Politics of Cinema

• How to Mock a Tyrant in The Great Dictator (1940)

  In this episode, we wrap up our look at depictions of fascism and authoritarianism on film with Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). Chaplin had the nerve to go fully anti-fascist and anti-racist at a moment when much of Hollywood was still pretending Hitler was just a distant "European problem". Chaplin mercilessly skewers Riefenstahl-style fascist pageantry and spectacle while also refusing the era's usual antisemitic caricatures. He centers half of the narrative on a working-class Jewish barber whose daily life is shattered by storm trooper raids that feel uncomfortably close to those carried out by modern ICE agents and militarized police. Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook 

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• Imagination as a Form of Resistance in Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

  This week, we descend into the dark fantasy fairytale of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006). Amid the rich craftsmanship of the fantasy world that Ofelia imagines, the film lays bare the horrors of Francoist Spain—all captured through Del Toro's anti-fascist cinema. The calculating evil of Captain Vidal, a devotee of Falangism and a violent patriarch, stands among the most iconic of Del Toro's villains.  With fascist rhetoric disturbingly mainstream in contemporary US politics, Pan's Labyrinth feels less like a historical fantasy and more like a warning. It is a portrait of how fascism seeps into the everyday and how resistance can be imagined and realized, even when hope is in short supply. The film's lush fantasy is always shadowed by real life violence, teaching us that fascism flourishes not in isolation but within the systems of power that capitalism creates and legitimizes. We wrap things up with a brief discussion of Pinocchio (2022), where Del Toro, ever the mythmaker, recasts a children's tale set during the rise to power of Italian fascism. Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook 

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• Silencing Opposition in The Act of Killing (2012) & The Look of Silence (2014)

  After spending a number of episodes in the past, today we're jumping to the 2010's. We're looking at two documentaries from Joshua Oppenheimer; The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). These docs reveal two different aspects of the chilling aftermath of Indonesia's 1965-66 anticommunist massacres, one looking at the perpetrators and one looking at the legacy of the victims. We also draw on Vincent Bevins' book The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World for our discussion on how the Washington-backed violence helped install a regime where the perpetrators not only won but shaped the official history ever since. Through state-sponsored propaganda, like Treachery of G30S/PKI (1984), and the active erasure of victims' stories from cultural memory, the truth went largely unaddressed within broader Indonesian society for decades. What makes these films deeply unsettling isn't just the brutality (although that is unsettling), but also the lessons they carry for the present. The rhetoric of the need to annihilate political opposition, once used to justify state terror in Indonesia, echoes in today's right-wing American discourse, where the constant invocation of civil war and the erasure of history are frighteningly familiar. Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook 

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• The Third Generation (1979) & Other Instruments of State Sponsored Terror

  After examining Robert Kramer's Ice (1970) fictionalize America in our last episode, we shift to West Germany to explore another cinematic portrayal of resistance to fascism in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Third Generation (1979). Set against West Germany's postwar society, Fassbinder sharply exposes how insincere revolutionary acts can become hollow gestures, exploited to justify expanded state control and surveillance. Though rooted in 1979, the film eerily anticipates our contemporary world: a society numbed by constant surveillance, manipulated by capitalist tech moguls profiting from manufactured crises, and how citizens are caught in a struggle against the technocratic elites. Additionally, Fassbinder's overwhelming audio landscape mimics the relentless noise of the modern internet, capturing the exhaustion and confusion of today's digital age. Drawing connections to our episodes that covered Uptight (1968), Children of Men (2006), and How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), we ask: what does resistance look like when liberal democracy itself seems to pave the road to authoritarianism? Fassbinder's vision resonates with our current dark historical moment, where our capacity to imagine alternatives is shrinking, and the internet serves as both a battlefield and a drain on the soul.  Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook 

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• Urban Guerrillas vs The State in Ice (1970)

  On this episode we wanted to see a depiciton of people resisting fascim, so we're looking at an Robert Kramer's Ice (1970). It's our first American film in this series and the resistance we're seeing comes from a cell of New York Urban guerillas. They are fighting a dystopian version of the Nixon administration and its illegal war of imperialism in Mexico.   Kramer's film is less a straightforward dystopia thriller than a raw document of the fractured leftist movements trying to organize within the belly of U.S. empire in the late 1960's. Kramer's handheld, on-location shooting style and use of non-actors offers a time capsule not just of American radicalism in 1970, but of filmmaking that rejects Hollywood polish for a Cassavetes style immediacy.   Ice is uniquely embedded in the struggles it portrays; Kramer and his peers were activists themselves, not just chroniclers. The result is a film that forgoes easy allegory or procedural clarity and instead immerses viewers in the skepticism, paranoia, and possibility of revolutionary change at a time when history felt radically contingent.   Follow us at: Patreon / Instagram / Letterboxd / Facebook 

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