may day

        

    

The Verdict

And the juror, once a fishwife in the market, springs to her feet.

THE FISHWIFE

    So, after all

    You've found a penny in those 

    Bloody hands? And the robber is bribing

    The court with his spoils?

THE TEACHER

    One cherry tree! He could have made

    That conquest with

    One man only! Instead he has sent

    80,000 down here!

THE BAKER

    How much

    Do they have to pay up there

    For a glass of wine and a roll?

THE COURTESAN

    Will they always have to sell their skins

    When they want to lie with a woman? Sent him to nothing-

    ness!

THE FISHWIFE

    Yes, to nothingness!

THE TEACHER

    Yes, to nothingness!

THE BAKER

    Yes, to nothingness!

THE SPEAKER

    And they look at the farmer

    The praiser of the cherry tree.

    What do you say, farmer?

(Silence)

THE FARMER

    80,000 for a cherry tree!

    Yes, to nothingness!

THE JUDGE

    Yes, to nothingness! For

    With all the violence and conquest

    Only one realm increases:

    The realm of the shades.

THE JURORS

    And our gray world below

    Is already full

    Of half-lived lives. Yet here

    We have no plows for sinewy arms, or

    Hungry mouths, of which up there

    You have so many! What but dust

    Could we heap upon

    The 80,000 slaughtered ones! And you

    Up there need houses! How often

    Shall we meet them on our

    Paths that lead nowhere and hear them asking their eager

    Terrible questions, what

    The summer of years is like, and the autumn

    And the winter?

THE SPEAKER

    And the legionaries on the frieze of the dad

    Move and cry out:

THE LEGIONARIES

    Yes, send him to nothingness! What province

    Tips the scales against

    Our unlived years that held so much?

THE SPEAKER

    And the slaves, haulers of the frieze

    Move and cry out:

THE SLAVES

    Yes, to nothingness! How long 

    Will they sit, he and his

    Inhuman kind, over men and lift

    Lazy hands and hurl the peoples

    Into bloody wars against each other?

    How long shall we

    Endure them and our kind endure them?

ALL

    Yes, to nothingness

    With him and all his kind!

THE SPEAKER

    And from high bench rise

    The spokesman of a posterity

    Many-handed for taking

    Many-mouthed for eating

    Eagerly reaping

    Rejoicing in life.

The Condemnation of Lucullus

Die Verurteilung des Lukullus, 1951

Libretto: Bertolt Brecht and Paul Dessau

              People's Health Tribunal, San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala, against Goldcorp Inc.

We are in a period where the ghost

of morality rules. In this period, the

atomic bomb made more victims

than the revolution of 1917. The pres-

ervation of this society such as it is,

yesterday in attempts at Fascist pres-

ervation, today in a bid for American 

preservation, this preservation alone

costs much more in blood, in men

and in freedom than the establish-

ment of a new world. Why hesitate?

                                   Elio Vittorini, 1946

*

This dedication to Danièle Huillet is also in memory of filmmaker and editor Patrícia Saramago (1975-2025) who suddenly passed away last October. Among the many films she gave her all to, it must be said that without her work as an editor there would be no Where Lies Yours Hidden Smile? (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, 2001, Pedro Costa), "the best film ever made about editing" (Godard) . It was Patrícia who solved the film's inherent technical (nigh existential) problems and did the grueling work of its impossible synchronization and formal unity, thus we have not only the Straubs' behavior, their rapport, their parting and rejoining, amplified, but also the operation of the montage magnified––the film material and evidence on the Moviola screen as they cut a new version of Sicilia! down to decisive half-frames––all as a colossal and infinitesimal one. Pedro Costa has said Patrícia saved the film. And this is how he reverentially introduced me to Patrícia 16 years ago, in Lisbon, in the old OPTEC office on Rua 1 de Dezembro: "She did the one. Yes, that one...," as he stepped aside to give me plenty of space to bow and kiss her. 

In the weeks before her death, I worked closely with Patrícia on the English subtitles of her first film as a director, Dois e Um Gato (Two and a Cat––which will premiere in Lisbon on May 3rd, 2026). She not only finished this film just before departing, she made a bold and necessary film, a vigorous and uneasy balancing act of heavy and light tones, humor and indignation, about housing problems and living conditions––a young couple and a cat struggling to live together in a tiny room in Lisbon from which they're about to be evicted. A film made with all the youth, outrage, and tenderness of a young first-time director, and all the precision and formal strength of an artisan who worked her craft as an editor for 25 years. Nothing terminal about it, in fact, the opposite: a ripe confection––against everything, everything one must be against. A pastel opening out of freedom from under the idiotic tyranny of landlords.

Patrícia, gone seven days shy 

of your 50th birthday

We will miss you –– !

*

Past May Day Dedications on Kino Slang 

2007 -  Examine Caesars 

2008 -  Song of Two Humans, But...!

2009 -  This Land is Mine

2010 -  Men Without Women

2011 -  Freedom

2012 -  Small Grasses

2013 -  That's Just What We Intend

2014 -  The Lizards

2015 -  (no post – misery)

2016 -  Complete Animals
2017 -  Huillet at Work (interview)

2017 -  Venez m'aider! (plus Duras on Othon)
2018 -  Straub/Huillet/Talking (interview)
2019 -  Born May 1st. . .

2020 -  We Caught a Political Conscience like One Catches                            Chickenpox

2021 -  May Night

2022 -  "...progress / away from / the bulk of humanity..."

2023 -  Dialectical at Every Second: Unpublished Interview with ​​Straub/Huillet by J. Hughes​, ​B. Krohn (1975)

2024 -  No Appeasement / Palestine / Eyes Do Not Want to Close At All Times

2025 -  "You must not think to fob-off our disgrace with a tale..."

"A Sympathetic Worker" by Roland Barthes

LOS ANGELES 

PLAYS ITSELF 

(2003, Thom Andersen)

For 41 years "A Sympathetic Worker," Roland Barthes' critique of Elia Kazan's ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), was excised from all English-language editions of his Mythologies (1957). The article only became available in 2013 as part of a new translation (reproduced below) by Richard Howard in a collection called Mythologies: The Complete Edition (Hill and Wang), as if it were marginalia for "completists." 

 

The omission of "A Sympathetic Worker" from all prior English editions of Mythologies is likely far from accident (and continues to be: Richard Brody's review of the 'Complete Edition' in The New Yorker also omits it). But, was "a rhetorically perfect piece of Marxist and Brechtian demystification," as the late Philip Watts called "A Sympathetic Worker," something dangerous to anyone? With optimism, I'd like to think it could've been, were it understood as our proper forewarning about the mystifications to come, were it used as an effective tool against the overexposures of the next generation of American cinema's hegemons, i.e. the New Hollywoods influenced by Kazan: Method acting, the expansion of the economic domination of the Star system through it, faux "direct cinema," Paul Schrader, endless individualist redemption themes, American capitalism as eternal, "new Christs," Scorsese, Weinstein, etc. etc. In short, there were those who worshipped ON THE WATERFRONT, and who duplicated and furthered its slavish naturalism and new outsider icons: they would be understood as blatantly reactionary here.   

 

For the Barthes of the 1950s, film criticism and Marxism were still newlyweds on honeymoon. This is suddenly clear in Roland Barthes' Cinema by Phillip Watts, an essential film book from 2016 containing roughly nine previously untranslated articles (along with commentary by Watts) of a combative, didactic Barthes tending to the cinema of his day and its problems: Cinemascope, Guitry's ROYAL AFFAIRS IN VERSAILLES, Chabrol's LE BEAU SERGE, new Leftist criticism (published in Positif), reaction, etc. 

 

At one point in Roland Barthes' Cinema, Watts quietly footnotes a shameless statement from Kazan on his services rendered to reaction, using essentially the same words that Orson Welles later used as pure denunciation, to loudly, definitively, and irrevocably condemn Kazan in front of a large audience at the Cinémathèque française in 1981, –– in fact the footnote is from Kazan's own autobiography: 

 

'When Brando at the end yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, "I'm glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!" that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I'd testified as I had... So when critics say that I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing (to the House Un-American Activities Committee), they are right.'" 

  

Kazan is less interesting than the fantastic phrase "identical heat" which he uses here. If you are interested in cinema, no need to check or re-check his work, as he's already been served to you in umpteenth dishes and regurgitations. Instead, go see or see again Abraham Polonsky and John Garfield's FORCE OF EVIL (1948), a real "foil to ON THE WATERFRONT's operatic dishonesty," as Lindsay Anderson succinctly put it.

 

"A Sympathetic Worker" was originally published in 1955 in Les Lettres nouvelles under the title "Comment démystifier" ("How to Demystify") and was re-titled by Barthes for Mythologies.   

 

Important: Throughout the original essay Barthes misspells Kazan as "Cazan."

—AR.

    

A SYMPATHETIC WORKER 

by Roland Barthes

Cazan's film ON THE WATERFRONT is a good example of mystification. It concerns, as you doubtless know, a handsome, indolent, slightly brutal longshoreman (Marlon Brando), whose consciousness is gradually awakened to Love and to the Church (in the form of a shock priest, Spellman style). Since this awakening coincides with the elimination of a fraudulent and abusive union and appears to involve the longshoremen in resisting their exploiters, some viewers have supposed we've been shown a courageous film, a "leftist" film determined to reveal the worker's problem to the American public. 

Actually, we are dealing once again with that truth vaccine whose very modern mechanism I have indicated apropos of other American films: a small gang of mobsters is made to symbolize the entire body of employers, and once this minor disorder is acknowledged and dealt with like a trivial and disgraceful pustule, the real problem is evaded, is never even named, and is thereby exorcised. 

Yet it is sufficient to describe objectively the "roles" in Cazan's film to establish its mystifying power beyond a doubt: the proletariat here is constituted by a group of weaklings submitting to a servitude they clearly recognize but lack the courage to shake off; the (capitalist) State is identical with absolute Justice and is the only possible recourse against the crime of exploitation: if the worker can make contact with the State (for instance, by communicating with the police and its investigative agencies), he is saved. As for the Church, in its phony modernist guise, it is merely a mediating power between the worker's constitutive poverty and the boss State's paternal power. Ultimately, moreover, this minor irritation of justice and conscience is soon resolved in the grand stability of a beneficent order, in which the workers resume their labor, the bosses fold their arms, and the priests bless both sides in their manifestly just functions. 

It is the ending, however, which betrays the film, at the very moment when many supposed Cazan had cunningly insinuated his progressivism: in the very last sequence we see Brando, by a superhuman effort, managing to present himself as a conscientious good worker to the boss waiting to meet with him. Now this boss is obviously a caricature, and the audience murmurs: See how Cazan has managed to ridicule the capitalists. 

Here or nowhere is the occasion to apply the demystification method proposed by Brecht and to examine the consequences of the attachment we feel for the film's main character. It is obvious that Brando is our positive hero to whom, despite his faults, the public gives its heart, according to that participation phenomenon without which, in general, we are reluctant to consider any entertainment possible. When this hero, all the greater for having rediscovered his conscience and his courage, exhausted, injured, yet still tenacious, heads for the boss who will give him work, our communion knows no bounds, we identify ourselves totally and unhesitatingly with this new Christ and participate unreservedly in his Calvary. Yet Brando's painful Assumption actually conduces to the passive acknowledgment of the eternal boss: what is orchestrated for us here, despite all the caricatures, is the restoration of order; with Brando, with the longshoremen with all the workers of America, we put ourselves, with a sense of victory and relief, back in the boss's hands which it serves no further purpose to portray as tainted: we have long since been snared in a fatal communion with this longshoreman who discovers a sense of social justice only to bestow it as a homage to American capital. 

As we see, it is the participational nature of this scene which objectively makes it an episode of mystification. Trained to love Brando from the start, we can no longer at any point criticize him or even admit we are conscious of his objective stupidity. Now it is precisely against the danger of such mechanisms that Brecht proposed his method of alienation. Brecht would have asked Brando to show his naiveté, to make us understand that despite all the sympathy we may feel for his misfortunes, it is still more important that we see their causes and their remedies. We can sum up Cazan's mistake by saying that what should have been judged was much less the capitalist than Brando himself. For there is much more to expect from the rebellion of victims than from the caricature of their executioners. 

*

The Hollywood movie industry had become such a maze of interlocked labor unions that jurisdictional disputes were inevitable. In September, 1946, a jurisdictional dispute led to one of the most violent strikes in West Coast history. Pickets numbered in the hundreds and frequently engaged in battles with the police. During one of the bitterest of these, cars were overturned and the officer, above, wounded. A fellow deputy sheriff held the mob at gun point while rescuers removed the injured man.  –– U.S. Camera, 1947. Photo: Frank Filan.

 

                    

  

 

Citizens:  

Care for us! True, indeed!  They ne'er cared for us yet.  Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich; and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor.  If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us.

Menenius (friend to noble Roman Coriolanus):  

Either you must

Confess yourselves wondrous malicious, 

Or be accus'd of folly.  I shall tell you

A pretty tale: it may be you have heard it;

But, since it serves my purpose, I will venture 

To stale't a little more.

Citizens:  

Well, I'll hear it, sir: yet you must not think to fob-off our disgrace with a tale: but, an't please you, deliver.

Menenius:  

There was a time when all the body's members

Rebell'd against the belly; thus accus'd it:––

That only like a gulf did remain

I' the midst o' the body, idle and unactive,

Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing

Like labour with the rest; where the other 

            instruments

Did see and hear, devise instruct, walk, feel, 

And, mutually participate, did minister 

Unto the appetite and affection common  

Of the whole body. The belly answered, ––

Citizens:  

Well, sir what answer made the belly? 

Menenius:  

Sir, I shall tell you. With a kind of smile, 

Which ne'er came from the lungs, but even thus

For, look you, I may make the belly smile 

As well as speak—it tauntingly replied 

To the discontented members, the mutinous 

            parts 

That envied his receipt; even so most fitly 

As you malign our senators for that

They are not such as you. 

Citizens:  

Your belly's answer? What! 

The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye, 

The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier, 

Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter.

With other muniments and petty helps 

In this our fabric, if that they, — 

Menenius: 

What then? 

'Fore me, this fellow speaks! 

What then? what then? 

Citizens:
Should by the cormorant belly be restrain'd

Who is the sink o' the body,— 

Menenius: 

Well, what then? 

Citizens:  

The former agents, if they did complain, 

What could the belly answer? 

Menenius: 

I will tell you;

If you'll bestow a small,––

of what you have little,—

Patience awhile, you'll hear the belly's answer. 

Citizen: 

Ye're long about it. 

Menenius: 

Note me this, good friend; 

Your most grave belly was deliberate,

Not rash like his accusers, and thus answer'd: 

'True is it, my incorporate friends,' quoth he, 

'That I receive the general food at first, 

Which you do live upon; and fit it is, 

Because I am the store-house and the shop

Of the whole body: but, if you do remember, 

I send it through the rivers of your blood, 

Even to the court, the heart, –– to the seat o' the brain; 

And, through the cranks and offices of man, 

The strongest nerves and small inferior veins

From me receive that natural competency 

Whereby they live: and though that all at once, 

You, my good friends,'—this says the belly,–– 

mark me, ––

Citizen:  

Ay, sir; well, well. 

Menenius:  

'Though all at once cannot

See what I do deliver out to each, 

Yet I can make my audit up, that all 

From me do back receive the flour of all, 

And leave me but the bran.' What say you to't? 

Citizens:  

It was an answer: how apply you this?

Menenius:  

The senators of Rome are this good belly, 

And you the mutinous members; for examine 

Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly 

Touching the weal o' the common, you shall find 

No public benefit which you receive

But it proceeds or comes from them to you 

And no way from yourselves. 

What do you think, 

You, the great toe of this assembly? 

Citizens: 

I the great toe! why the great toe? 

Menenius:  

For that, being one o' the lowest, basest, poorest

Of this most wise rebellion, thou go'st foremost: 

Thou rascal, that art worst in blood to run, 

Lead'st first to win some vantage. 

But make you ready your stiff bats and clubs: 

Rome and her rats are at the point of battle;

The one side must have bale.

   

AMERICAN TEETH

Bramkamp:  The acting of the American Christine Whittlesey is especially interesting as an enlargement on how you're working with gestures and expressive means. This irradiates also backwards and opens another possibility to perceive your earlier films. Regarding the end of PARIS, TEXAS, you once critically remarked that Nastassja Kinski far too often played with her hair....

Straub:  Like this (gestures, shoving his hair back repeatedly), she's doing this 10 times...

Bramkamp:  You only said that: Something is wrong. It seems to me that the acting of Christine Whittlesey is near to this question of mimetic repetitions. She fully opens her eyes, closes them, and lets a smile follow. Then she repeats this sequence almost like a ballet. Until one recognizes: there is a rule to this mimic. But at the same time she's playing with the features of American expressivity. Now something strange is happening: when this mimicking goes together with the music and her simultaneous singing in front of the camera.

Straub:  These are repetitions which are structured and not happening arbitrarily. Precisely as she's American we reached this. And that's why we tried it. We wouldn't have tried it with a European vocalist.

Bramkamp:  Because she already had the training?

Straub:  (Nods). And as, for example, she likes so much showing her teeth. That's how we always bantered with her. During the work we told her "Now here you wouldn't show your teeth all the time. But only here, and there," and so on. Now when are walking in the street and we see (certain) women in their cars, I'm always saying to Danièle: "Again! Another one who likes so much showing her teeth..."

(Interview)

                   They died, cried and snorted. In colors. 

                 Now all that's left is the image. 

*

Past May Day 

Dedications to Danièle Huillet 

on Kino Slang 

2007 -  Examine Caesars 

2008 -  Song of Two Humans, But...!

2009 -  This Land is Mine

2010 -  Men Without Women

2011 -  Freedom

2012 -  Small Grasses

2013 -  That's Just What We Intend

2014 -  The Lizards

2015 -  (no post – misery)

2016 -  Complete Animals
2017 -  Huillet at Work (interview)

2017 -  Venez m'aider! (plus Duras on Othon)
2018 -  Straub/Huillet/Talking (interview)
2019 -  Born May 1st. . .

2020 -  We Caught a Political Conscience like One Catches Chickenpox

2021 -  May Night

2022 -  "...progress / away from / the bulk of humanity..."

2023 -  Dialectical at Every Second – Unpublished Interview with ​​Straub/Huillet by J. Hughes​, ​B. Krohn (1975)

2024 -  No Appeasement - Palestine - Eyes Do Not Want to Close At All Times