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American Experience: Emma Goldman. Written,
produced, and directed by Mel Bucklin. WGBH, 2004.
Goldman Lite by Richard Kostelanetz
I have long regarded Emma Goldman as one of the great
American anti-statists. I maintain a more-than-sentimental interest in anything
new that comes to light about her, so I eagerly anticipated Mel Bucklin's 2004
documentary about her that aired on "public television" as part of PBS's American
Experience series. I was disappointed.
| | Richard
Kostelanetz has published books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and cultural
history. |
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Stylistically, it is a typical product of National Endowment for the
Humanities support: a succession of talking heads solemnly filmed against
brown-tinged settings which, out of focus, suggest the interviews took place in a
library, reflecting the deleterious visual influence of the NEH's favorite
documentarian, Ken Burns. Most of these heads belong to professors, members of
the academic party, who were subsidized for advising the filmmaker. Their
cooperation is required by an NEH whose funding bias is essentially Stalinist,
much as Eastern European cultural czars required that Communist Party members be
subsidized for their official cultural produce. As a result, the principal images
in the film do not belong to Emma Goldman but to the talking heads. Turn off the
sound, and you realize that these middle-aged folk could be talking about
anything under the sun. Ignore the picture, and you'll hear comments that are
often puerile.
The talking heads compensate for the absence of any footage or audio of
Goldman herself, which is unfortunate, because she was reputed to be a great
lecturer. The most vivid testimonial to her oratorical prowess comes from the
American writer Henry Miller, likewise an anarchist, who heard her in San Diego
at the beginning of the last century. However, Miller isn't mentioned, perhaps
because he wasn't an academic. Nor does the documentary acknowledge my friend
Alix Kates Schulman, who edited the best-known Goldman anthology three decades
ago and wrote a biography of her. Perhaps not coincidentally, Schulman isn't a
professor either. Oddly, this Stalinist operational principle at the NEH has
survived administrations both Republican and Democratic, neither apparently aware
of the profound subversion of culture they were sponsoring.
A disconcerting insecurity about Goldman's physical appearance permeates the
film. Inconsistent still photographs of her face seem to portray different women.
As no one comments on these discrepancies, you wonder if the filmmakers watched
what they produced. Historian Martin Duberman describes Goldman as physically
imposing, while the filmmakers show photographs of her that reveal a short woman,
barely more than five feet tall.
What is finally lacking from the film is an afterimage, which is the measure
of any visual art, either kinetic or static — the image that sticks in your
head long after you've seen the work. Without an afterimage, the documentary is
just journalism or, as in this case, mere interviews. Indeed, a stronger
afterimage of Goldman appears in Warren Beatty's pseudo-fictional Reds (1981), in
which she is portrayed by Maureen Stapleton. From Jessica Litwak's one-woman Emma
Goldman theatrical performance, which I witnessed a decade ago, I recall an even
stronger afterimage. |
| What is finally lacking
from the film is an afterimage, which is the measure of any visual art.
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The soupy generic Muzak behind the speakers in this film is not just awful.
Having wondered whether the producers watched the film they created, I found
myself wondering also whether they listened to it.
What mystifies me, especially given the federal government's sponsorship of
the film, is the documentary's minimizing her most important achievement in
political criticism — discovering early, really early, from a perspective
customarily labeled leftist, that Lenin's Soviet Union offered not freedom but a
new kind of despotism. Needlessly deported from the U.S., to which she immigrated
as a child, she went to Russia soon after the revolution with high expectations.
Quickly noting that the Party functionaries had become a new aristocracy, she
published two pioneering classics of anti-Soviet criticism, "My Disillusionment
with Russia" (1923) and "My Further Disillusionment with Russia" (1924), both of
which are still readable. These books weren't mentioned at all. The film also
neglected her critical analysis of the Spanish Civil War, perhaps because the
producers ran out of money, or because they could find no talking heads to
narrate her final decade.
The real contribution of the film to the documentary tradition is its
unusually frank discussion of Goldman's sex life. Believing early that women
should have control of their own bodies, she slept around, as we would now say,
and could even be sort of enslaved to a skilled lover. Her enthusiasm, and her
tastes, are portrayed in a remarkable dramatized seduction involving the removal
of underwear typical a century ago (no bra!) to show bodies that are apparently
nude (though partially obscured, perhaps in keeping with the sensibilities of
those who produce material for public television) even if their heads and private
parts are kept privatized, so to speak.
Elsewhere, the playwright Tony Kushner uses a four-letter word for excrement
that is not bleeped or blanked out, even though it is among the seven for which
the New York radio station WBAI was prosecuted not too long ago. So "adult" is
this film that a friend felt embarrassed when watching it with her pre-teen
daughter before the latter's bedtime. If the anti-porn fanatics in John
Ashcroft's Justice Department screen this film, will they prosecute the
filmmaker? Or their own NEH, not for Stalinism but — always for the wrong
thing — the support of obscenity? Or disinter Emma Goldman from her Chicago
grave? Stay tuned.
I know of no great documentary that is a pointless succession of talking
heads, except perhaps Leni Riefenstal's Triumph of the Will (1934), about Adolf
Hitler and his cronies. Indeed, her Olympia (1936), which I regard among the
greatest documentaries, didn't get "up close and personal" with anyone. West
German sponsors, I know from experience, haven't sanctioned bureaucratic
rigamarole conducive to mediocrity, which accounts for their sponsoring superior
documentaries and other films.
The truest scandal of the NEH and its sister, the National Endowment for the
Arts, is not that they supported porn or financed reds but that they extended
taxpayer support to so many people and so much poor work that is, to be frank,
negligible in the sad, continuing tradition of inept federal welfare.
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