Socialism is a dream, and so are movies.
As long as the road to a future beyond capitalism remains uncertain in its precise course, activists benefit from building a collective capacity for creativity. We can do this in part by drawing inspiration from the immense artistic output of the international Left, whose examinations of industrial society and depictions of working-class resistance have, in every decade and in every medium, conceived of strange and exciting logics of liberation.
The best and easiest art form for a big group to enjoy together is cinema. At our spring convention last year, Champlain Valley Democratic Socialists of America resolved to create a “movie night working group,” which we ended up calling Socialist Film Club. As a lifelong cinephile and former minimum-wage movie theater employee, I volunteered to serve as the chair.
Once a month, here in Burlington, Vermont, we watch a movie and then talk about it. The movies make for often surprisingly rich starting points for open-ended discussion of the sort that leftist book clubs may more typically seek to foster. Socialist Film Club has become an important part of our calendar, counterbalancing the predetermined political character of our canvasses and rallies by providing flexible prompts for casual members to begin imagining socialism in their own way and to reconcile their different imaginings in a low-stakes setting.
So far, it has outlasted CVDSA’s attempts to create this kind of environment through formal political education. This is principally because movies are fun. Limiting selections to narrative features, usually with runtimes below two hours, has helped avoid a feeling of homework.
We’ve also prioritized novelty. I argued against an early proposal to invite the membership to pick movies by voting — which I feared would yield a Socialist Film Club of too-familiar favorites from the contemporary left-wing canon, like Parasite (2019) and Sorry to Bother You (2018) — and suggested instead tasking the chair with researching lesser-known titles and curating a unique lineup. Against its usual democratic instincts, the chapter gave me its trust.
I made the gamble riskier still by forgoing my own list of cherished socialist classics: I Am Cuba (1964), Salt of the Earth (1954), La Chinoise (1967), Tout va bien (1972), W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), Hunger (2008), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Organizer (1963), Rebellion in Patagonia (1974). My longtime interest in world cinema, by which I’d gained an awareness of its major and minor figures, afforded me a measure of confidence in choosing movies based on their pedigrees alone and experiencing them for the first time alongside my comrades. Not every viewer has loved every choice, but the method hasn’t yet resulted in any disasters.
What makes a movie “socialist”? In theory, a director could address any subject through a socialist lens, and any director’s work might benefit from a socialist reading, but I’ve focused specifically on stories of class struggle, whether from a radical or reformist perspective.
Much of the great anticapitalist cinema — from Modern Times (1936) to RoboCop (1987) to Sorry We Missed You (2019) — describes the horrors and inequities of the bourgeois dictatorship, not what people can do about it. Better suited to our purposes may be films that investigate the processes and instruments by which socialism can be achieved or the forms that socialism has already taken.
At Socialist Film Club, we’ve watched movies about labor unions (Blue Collar [1978] and Norma Rae [1979]) and about revolutions (La Marseillaise [1938], Compañeros [1970], and Sambizanga [1972]). We witnessed one fictional experiment in collective farming (Our Daily Bread [1934]). Spanning societies administered by self-styled Communists (Divided Heaven [1964], Strawberry and Chocolate [1993], and The Piano in a Factory [2010]) and by Western neoliberals (High Hopes [1988]), several of the films demonstrated in various ways the durability of the socialist cause under difficult historical circumstances.
I strayed from my programming formula with 99 Homes (2014), a left-liberal critique of capitalism (to the extent that such a thing can exist). For variety, I had wanted a modern film with Hollywood stars and settled on a festival-circuit indie about Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon navigating the fallout of the subprime mortgage crisis. While it effectively — if somewhat unsubtly — dramatized the human toll of the Great Recession’s evictions and foreclosures, its revulsion at the callousness of our profit-driven housing regime felt stuck in a sentimentalization of middle-class homeownership, lacking a socialist solution.
Most DSA members already possess this kind of anger at capitalism’s cruelties. What some may not yet possess is a vivid capacity to envision alternatives. Far more moving to me than the melodrama of 99 Homes was the utopian fantasy of Walking the Streets of Moscow (1964). A light comedy about youth, friendship, romance, and urban life with almost no overt political content, it took the optimism of the Khrushchev Thaw and its relative economic prosperity and turned that dream of the Soviet Union’s sure-to-be-blissful future into a 78-minute on-screen present.
Alternating between anglophone and subtitled films over 14 months, Socialist Film Club has screened movies in seven languages. The Landlord (1970), popularly deemed “not socialist,” was the funniest, Punishment Park (1971) the darkest. The free showings have drawn regular attendance from our core activists while also helping us build relationships with curious outsiders.
Our modest success story owes in large part to our lucky access to a worthy space for group viewings, facilitated through a partnership with the YDSA chapter at our local university, whose members make up a significant part of CVDSA. Hosting the movies on campus isn’t ideal for our mixed audience, but we can’t beat a modern lecture hall’s projection or sound without spending big bucks to rent an auditorium in town. At that point, our friendly screenings would become “public performances” with admission fees, and we’d need to acquire a costly license to exhibit each movie. We prefer to keep things simple.
During summers, we have to use our chapter’s normal meeting space. It, too, has digital hookups, but its pull-down screen is smaller, and the projector sometimes overheats. Still, it mostly works, and even a very cheap projector carries with it a touch of “movie magic” in comparison to a TV screen.
We also try to make Socialist Film Club an attractive night out by offering free popcorn, candy, and soda. The popcorn maker cost $140, but the ongoing expenses don’t add up to a ton. Any DSA chapter could put together a version of the same program. Solidarity Cinema, a free archive, has a better catalog of left-wing content than any overpriced streaming service.
I enjoy participating in DSA in general, but occasionally it can raise my blood pressure. Socialist Film Club lets me connect with a powerful source of personal joy without unplugging from organizing, and it ensures that our chapter’s members can look forward to at least one event per month that won’t ask much of them except to have a good time. Ultimately, we end up getting more out of it than just that.