Seen enough marvel shlock, want something that isn’t subversive within a system but directly fights against it and loudly
Keep your negative takes out please I’ve had it with the irony poisoned doomerism of late
Sorry to Bother You is the most explicit example that I can think of.
Snowpiercer maybe? If They Live is too symbolic, that might not work, but it’s the closest I can think of. Also Revolutionary Girl Utena, but that’s entirely metaphorical. I just really like it and will recommend it at the drop of a hat.
Back on the old sub I had a saved post someone made of a list of these kinds of films. All of them were made in non English speaking countries, which makes sense when you think about it since English speaking countries are less likely to promote taking on a system they benefit from. But since the sub is gone that post is gone so I have lost the list… I only remember one film mentioned which was The Battle of Algiers
Revolutionary Girl Utena is something I haven’t seen yet but I’d say the name suggests its about taking on the system.
Antz is about taking on the system unironically lol. Its something worth noting that in western media you’re more likely to find people fighting oppressors in children’s media than in adult media.
Hell yeah, Utena. Fighting the patriarchy AND the “girlboss feminism” that doesn’t subvert systems but merely replaces some men at the top with some women.
CW: abuse and rape.
I deleted previous comment cos I misread what you said.
I think I should just put on hold all the other shit I’m watching and actually watch Utena
If you have the url still, archive.org may have it in the wayback machine.
People (including me) ask this every week but its still not enough. Why is it so hard to find something genuinely revolutionary? Does some unspeakable fate happen to anyone who tries to make revolutionary art that everyone else knows about except me???
Anyway I recommend The Spook Who Sat By the Door
Edit: Sorry if that came across as doomer shit it wasnt meant to be doomer shit
Conditioning. People have genuinely been conditioned to see any big changes to the status quo as evil. Except when it’s a glorious revolution against some totalitarian guy that establishes “democracy”, like in Hunger games. The entire entertainment apparatus is aimed at showing revolutionary thought and fantasy about alternative social structures as bad. You only have kingdoms that are some good. Democracies that are sometimes corrupt but always good, cause voting and dictatorships, that are both fash and commie coded at the same time.
That said, I’ve been enjoying Red Rising so far.
English speaking people largely don’t want a revolution, the amount of people who do is so small that there isn’t a market for commodified froms of entertainment under the capitalist mode of production. The amount is so small that the size of the talent pool limits the amount of independently developed art I’d expect to see even. This is slowly shifting, but you usually end up with something “progressive” with an anti-capitalist veneer if you’re lucky (I know Boots is cool, but maybe Sorry To Bother You fits in here?).
“Revolutionary” is still a step too far and sounds pretty crackpot to most English speakers
It’s funny, there’s a shitload of movies about that one good Nazi (or films featuring that one good Nazi), but it’s hard to think of a single Hollywood film where communists are even mentioned, let alone portrayed as good.
Enemy at the Gate is a movie about how Communism can’t work because Rachel Weiss wants to bang one dude but not the other dude.
I recently attempted a rewatch. The film begins with the Soviets shooting their own soldiers, something which never actually happened. I first saw enemy at the gates as a kid and didn’t know that I was being brainwashed.
If you want revolutionary-themed films, then the revolutionary film maker in both artistic and political sense is still Sergei Eisenstein. Lots of his work happened in the silent movie era and can be challenging to watch for modern viewers but I think it is worth the effort.
I can recommend The Strike (1925) about a strike in tsarist Russia and his more famous works The Battleship Potemkin (1925) about the mutiny and Alexander Nevsky (1938) that tells the story of the medieval Russian leader as an allegory for the fascist German invasion that was impending at the time.
