‘Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind’: Finding America In Its Silenced Voices
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The trees and burial sites that populate “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind” may seem serene on the surface, but a provocative history lies beneath. John Gianvito’s experimental documentary, which begins a weeklong run at Anthology Film Archives on Friday, plots an alternative chronicle of America through a pastoral catalog of progressive heroes that includes such renowned players as Thomas Paine and Sojourner Truth, as well as forgotten figures.
“I wanted my emphasis to be predominantly on those names and events that are too regularly excluded from traditional, orthodox history books,” Mr. Gianvito said recently of his film, which has intrigued audiences at the Tribeca Film Festival and internationally.
But rather than marching out a didactic lineup of talking eggheads, “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind” is made up almost entirely of landscape shots from memorials and cemeteries across the nation. Mr. Gianvito turns the leafy series into an extended contemplative encounter that ties the political history, and the viewer, to the land in all its senses. Some sites are adorned with informative plaques, others clearly neglected, but little accompanies their images beyond ambient noise (often, yes, a whispering wind).
Just shy of 60 minutes long, “Profit Motive” spans Colonial (and pre-Colonial) times all the way through the 20th century, including proponents and martyrs for civil rights. The purview speaks to Mr. Gianvito’s inspiration, Howard Zinn’s radical retelling of American history, “A People’s History of the United States.” The names in “Profit Motive” encompass the known and the unknown in women’s rights, early popular rebellion, Indian and slave struggles, religious causes, and labor strife, all of which fall under the perceived broad-based importance of the “progressive” banner.
“Labels are what they are, a convenience,” Mr. Gianvito said. “I tend to use them as well. But I use the term ‘progressive’ in its dictionary sense referring to any ‘person who actively favors or strives for progress toward better conditions, as in society or government.'”
That probably won’t assuage any audience members fuming at the very mention of, say, Eugene Debs. Yet a complex irony is at work in “Profit Motive,” in the cross-country pilgrimages undertaken to hunt down these open-air memorials and reassemble a kind of living textbook. The travels and the style of “Profit Motive” also recall the American chronicles of the landscape filmmaker James Benning, whose works include “13 Lakes” and “RR.”
“In fact, Benning’s work was an unfortunate gap for me, as I had never seen his films,” Mr. Gianvito said. “I’ve since seen three and I was truly knocked out by them. I think he is a national treasure.”
Besides two or three line-drawn animations to break the flow, Mr. Gianvito, whose previous film, “The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein,” won praise for its eloquent sense of place (New Mexico), also deviates from the traditional landscape film with a coda that abandons the preceding restrained lyricism. A staccato montage of various rallies, shot between 2004 and 2006, links contemporary protest movements with the efforts of the past. It’s an understandable move that helps avoid a purely elegiac film, though the implicit call to arms also hems in the multilayered appeal of what comes before.
Regardless, the film has met with accolades at the festival showings that preceded this week’s premiere theatrical run at Anthology (where it will screen with Saul Levine’s “New Left Note”).
“The relative ‘success’ of the film as a whole has itself been quite the surprise,” Mr. Gianvito, who is currently logging long hours editing his next project, said. “And many people have been very kind in communicating to me the ways the experience of the film stirred them.”
The communicating will likely continue on Friday, when Mr. Gianvito presents his film in person. A slice of history unlike any you’ll see in historical documentaries this year, “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind” is provocative both aesthetically and politically.
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