A New Reality is Better Than a New Movie! Committed Documentary and Class Struggle at the End of the American New Left by Zachary Williams B.A. (Sociology), Simon Fraser University, 2014 Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the School of Communication Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology © Zachary Williams SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Spring 2019 Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Approval Name: Zachary Williams Degree: Master of Arts Title: A New Reality is Better Than a New Movie! Committed Documentary and Class Struggle At the End of the American New Left Examining Committee: Chair: Frédérik Lesage Assistant Professor Zoë Druick Senior Supervisor Professor Christopher Pavsek Examiner Associate Professor School of Contemporary Arts Jonathan Kahana External Examiner Professor Film and Digital Media University of California, Santa Cruz Date Defended/Approved: February 27, 2019 ii Abstract This thesis investigates the political conjuncture surrounding the U.S. New Communist Movement’s break with the New Left of the 1960s, tracing the coordinates of this ideological shift through the lens of committed documentary. I argue that a materialist analysis of committed documentary necessitates understanding the form according to an aesthetics of political use-value. By attending to the question of documentary’s political utility, I demonstrate how films were used as cultural tools for conducting hegemonic struggles over certain political issues. Focusing on the contested dialectical relation between class and race, I trace period debates over the political status of the black proletariat through readings of four documentaries: Columbia Revolt (1968), Black Panther (1968), Finally Got the News (1970), and Wildcat at Mead (1972). Through these analyses, I argue for the centrality of political organization to any useful theory and practice of cultural commitment as a form of revolutionary politics. Keywords: committed documentary; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; New Communist Movement; New Left; Newsreel; October League iii Dedication This is an optional page. Use your choice of paragraph style for text on this page (1_Para_FlushLeft shown here). of course For Meaghan, of course iv Acknowledgements Not a single word of this thesis would have been possible without the steadfast love, support, and friendship of my wife Meaghan Iversen. She has patiently and graciously encouraged me through the many, many iterations of this project as I have slowly stumbled my way toward the version you have before you. Thank you to my senior supervisor Dr. Zoë Druick, who has been a great source of insight and encouragement the past few years, even when I imagine I was a trying advisee. In those infrequent moments when we have parted ways intellectually, I do believe that her critiques have only served to sharpen and hone my own positions. This thesis is undoubtedly better for her contribution. For all of this, I owe a great debt of thanks. I am deeply grateful as well to my examiner Dr. Christopher Pavsek, who has posed for me a rigorous and exciting vision of Marxist film scholarship since I first saw Eisenstein, Sirk, Fassbinder, and Tahimik in his introductory film history class nearly a decade ago. And thank you also to my external examiner Dr. Jonathan Kahana, not only for his thoughtful engagement with my project, but for the invaluable insights his own work has offered in the course of my research. Of course, I would be remiss if I failed to properly thank Sylvia Roberts and Donald Taylor from the SFU Library for their help in tracking down what are some very obscure films. Thank you to Jennifer Zerkee from the SFU Copyright Office for making copyright law make sense, and thank you to Kierra Enns from the SFU Research Commons for the equally impressive feat of making the byzantine formatting of the Library’s thesis template make sense. Thank you also to Roselly Torres, Eugene Lee, and Danny Kim from Third World Newsreel and Livia Bloom Ingram from Icarus Films for their kind permissions and help in reproducing images from films I truly believe to be among the most important of their era. Columbia Revolt, from which I include still images in Chapter 2, was preserved by Third World Newsreel in 2013 with the assistance of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Thank you to my friends, colleagues, and comrades in the Teaching Support Staff Union, School of Communication, Young Communist League, and Communist Party of Canada for providing me with the spaces and relationships to work through the political and cultural ideas that have found their way into these pages. I beg your v forgiveness for all of the hours spent reading and writing rather than organizing with you. Thank you to my first and oldest friend, my brother Levi Williams, who has contributed, both directly and indirectly, so much to the way I think about the world and our responsibilities to it. And finally, I cannot adequately express my thanks to my parents, Marilyn and Randy Williams, who have always supported and encouraged my intellectual pursuits, even when it meant me devoting some two and a half years to thinking about communist documentaries and decades-old political debates and polemics. The majority of the research and writing that became A New Reality is Better Than a New Movie! was carried out on the unceded and occupied territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), kʷikʷəƛ̓ əm (Kwikwetlem), Katzie, and Stó:lō. To all of the comrades who have come before us, who have indirectly made this project possible through their commitment to universal liberation, I hope that the chapters to follow will serve as both fitting tribute and comradely critique. As ever, ¡Hasta la victoria siempre! vi Table of Contents Approval .......................................................................................................................... ii Abstract .......................................................................................................................... iii Dedication ...................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... v Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... vii List of Figures................................................................................................................. ix List of Acronyms .............................................................................................................. x Epigraph ......................................................................................................................... xi Chapter 1. Introduction: Commitment and the Aesthetics of Political Use-Value . 1 1.1. Documentary Culture of the Late New Left ........................................................... 3 1.2. Commitment and Art ............................................................................................. 8 1.3. Commitment and Party ....................................................................................... 11 1.4. Commitment and Documentary .......................................................................... 14 1.5. Agenda ............................................................................................................... 19 Chapter 2. Newsreel: Propaganda Arsenal of the Late New Left? ........................ 22 2.1. Newsreel, 1967-1971 .......................................................................................... 24 2.2. Columbia Revolt and the “New Working Class” .................................................. 33 2.3. Black Panther: “No More Brothers in Jail” ........................................................... 38 2.4. A Compartmentalized World ............................................................................... 45 2.5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 3. “A Component Part of the General Struggle of All the People of the World”: Black Detroit and Finally Got the News ............................................. 54 3.1. White Newsreel, Black League ........................................................................... 58 3.2. Montage: From the Fields to the Factory to the Streets ...................................... 65 3.3. Labour Time and Surplus-Value ......................................................................... 69 3.4. “Race” as Object of Hegemonic Struggle ............................................................ 70 3.5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 78 Chapter 4. “The Original Film Was Much Tougher”: Wildcat at Mead Between the October League and the United Front .............................................................. 82 4.1. SDS / RYM / OL ................................................................................................. 85 4.2. Atlanta as Concrete Situation ............................................................................. 88 4.3. Can Wildcat at