Word: marxist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fassbinder has stated "I don't make any films which aren't political." (Film Comment, Nov-Dec. '75) Mother Kusters, though stamped through and through with Marxist politics, fails because it makes no final political statement. While Fassbinder evokes a hope in the humanity of the proletariat, he does not illuminate any possibility of revolutionary change from within their ranks. Mother K. is the woman who can never be a revolutionary because she is too easily swayed, too easily disillusioned. She is anxious for rapid and broad-sweeping change but, when that fails, will satisfy herself with petit-bourgeois dreams...
...that anymore." By the time he made Mother Kusters Fassbinder, influenced by the films of Douglas Sirk, had begun to think that the primary aim of film is to satisfy an audience and then bring in politics. He states that "there is no objective reality" and, therefore, unlike most Marxist artists he cannot be interested in portraying any reality but instead claims he can invoke action through a melodrama wedded to an insistent pessimism. "The only reality," he insists, "is the relation of the work to its public. It's a collision between film and subconscious that creates...
...presence of a kindly man. Though genuine, this appearance seems somewhat incongruous after one looks a moment longer and notices the long scar, left by a fascist bullet, which runs down his neck. An activist in the American Communist Party for 30 years, Nelson is, above all else, a Marxist and a fighter. These two characteristics made it almost inevitable that Nelson would join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and go to Spain...
...arrived in Spain in February 1937 and fought for more than a year until the International Brigades were sent home by the republicans in 1938. In Spain, he served as the brigade's second-in-command, the political commissar. But only a small part of his career as a Marxist actively seeking change was spent in Spain. Born in Yugoslavia in 1904, Nelson emigrated to the U.S. and became a radical worker in the 1920s, soon joining the Communist Party and becoming embroiled in the battles of the American left. As a party member, Nelson agitated for unions, civil rights...
After leaving the party for ideological reasons in 1957, Nelson returned to carpentry and built his current home in Truro. He has remained a committed Marxist, but he is quick to note the different interpretations of Marxism. He says about the Soviet Union and China. "The main thing is that they are not a model for us" and he faults them for their repression of dissidents. "A more native type of Marxism" best suits the U.S., Nelson says, and he favors the Western European Communist parties which support civil liberties and work within the democratic processes...