The wobblies

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Movie
German title The wobblies
Original title The wobblies
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1979
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Stewart Bird / Deborah Shaffer
music Joe Hill , Utah Phillips et al. v. a. m.
camera Sandi Sissel, Judy Irola, Peter Gessner and Bonnie Friedman

The Wobblies is an American documentary film by Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird about the history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The film combines the memories of IWW veterans with footage from the world of work at the beginning of the 20th century, historical workers' songs and other archive material. The documentary premiered on October 11, 1979 at the prestigious New York Film Festival , received numerous awards and ran on January 24, 1981 with German subtitles on NDR's third television program .

Subject

Wobblies called themselves workers who belonged to the IWW in the first decades of the 20th century, a radical movement within the North American labor movement . According to legend, the nickname goes back to a Chinese chef who is said to have answered the policemen's question about which organization he belongs to in wheel-breaking English: "I Wobble-U Wobble-U."

Immigrants like this Chinese, for example, played such a big role in the Wobblies because they - like women and African-Americans - were excluded from the established skilled workers' unions of the American Federation of Labor as mostly unskilled, low-wage earners . The IWW, on the other hand, had already spoken out in favor of the syndicalist organization of all industrial workers regardless of their origin, educational level, religion, gender and skin color at their founding congress in 1905 . Together they should use the means of industrial action to campaign for the abolition of the wage system in the One Big Union .

The makers of The Wobblies intended to allow those involved in the historical class confrontations - based on the historical method of oral history - to have their say in detail as contemporary witnesses . Since the total of 19 interview partners appearing in the film were already between 75 and 97 years old at the time of production at the end of the 1970s, it stands to reason that the focus of the documentary is on the years 1912 to 1920, while the IWW's early years have been since 1905 tend to remain underexposed.

The film was not meant to be a chronological representation or a traditional organizational history. The dramaturgy groups the narratives of the IWW veterans along the struggle stories of different categories of workers: strikes by textile workers in New England , dockworkers militancy in coastal cities, free speech fights by loggers and harvest workers in the Wild West as well as fights in the remote miners' settlements of the Rocky Mountains . The documentary illustrates the memories of the IWW veterans with film recordings from the respective working worlds as well as with an abundance of comics and cartoons that were produced by sympathizers and opponents of the Wobblies for propaganda purposes. Workers' songs (by Joe Hill, among others ) serve as background music, but some of the interviewees from the “singing union” also intend them themselves.

Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer conclude their production with the violent suppression of the Wobbly movement after 1917 - the year the USA entered the war and the year of the Russian Revolution . During the so-called Red Scare , a climate of anti-communist propaganda towards the end of the First World War , strike movements were brutally suppressed by the US judiciary and the National Guard , and hundreds of IWW activists were arrested.

Contributors

In the 90-minute film, 19 former wobblies have their say: the migrant worker Joe Murphy, the silk weaver Irma Lombardi (83), the migrant worker Jack Miller (89), the textile worker Angelo Rocco (95), the dock worker James Fair (80), the Silk weaver Sophie Cohen (77), Roger Baldwin (95), the reporter Art Shields (90), the migrant worker Nicholas Steelink (89), the woodcutter Tom Scribner (80), the silk weaver Dominick Mignone (86), the migrant worker Nels Peterson ( 89), the miner's wife Katie Pintek (89), the woodcutter Irv Hanson, the migrant worker Sam Krieger (born 1902), the woodcutter Vaino Konga, Mike Foudy, the folk singer Utah Phillips and Fred Thompson, the editor of Industrial Worker . A large part of the background text is spoken by the co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger Baldwin.

In addition to the directing duo Bird and Shaffer, the film team included Sandi Sissel, Judy Irola, Peter Gessner and Bonnie Friedman (camera), Dixie Beckham, Joe De Francesco and Deborah Shaffer (sound), Pierce Rafferty (archive research), Erika Gottfried (research) , Peter Smallman (photo research), Peter Gessner and Marilyn Fraunglass (co-authors).

Together with Dan Georgakas , the publisher of the film magazine Cineaste, Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird wrote in 1985 under the title “Solidarity Forever. An Oral History of the IWW ”published a book containing long versions of the conversations they had with the wobblies appearing in the film.

Directors

In the 1970s, Deborah Shaffer belonged to the left-wing filmmaker collective Third World Newsreel and, after completing the Wobbly documentary, made films about El Salvador ("El Salvador. Another Vietnam", 1981), Nicaragua ("Report from the front ”, 1983;“ Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements ”, 1985;“ Fire from the Mountain ”, 1987) and the Chilean opposition (“ Dance of Hope ”, 1989). Her more recent films include a four-part artist documentary under the individual titles "Consumtion", "Identity", "Place" and "Spirituality" from 2001. Shaffer has received numerous awards for her films, including an Oscar and an Emmy and the Golden Palm of Cannes.

Stewart Bird, the author of a wobbly drama about the Haywood trial and fellow director with Shaffer on the production of "The Wobblies", wrote "Home Free All", a comedy about a frustrated ex-left in the middle of the 1980s filmed the midlife crisis that unsuccessfully embarks on a search for meaning with his friend.

production

Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird had already dealt extensively with the history of the IWW in the 1970s. Shaffer, for example, had wanted to produce a film about the textile workers' strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts for a long time , but could not raise the necessary funds. Separately, Stewart Bird had a play with Peter Robilotta entitled "The US vs. Wm. D. Haywood, et al. ”, Which premiered in 1977 at the Labor Theater in New York, 59 years after the Chicago show trial of“ Big Bill ”Haywood and 100 other IWW activists began. Because many former wobblies had traveled to New York to perform the play, Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer took the opportunity to socialize with these Wobbly veterans.

With the help of their assistant Pierce Rafferty, the two directors researched the background information and archive materials used to illustrate the interviews in the documentary in numerous US archives. As can be seen from the end credits of the film, the directors also took advice from Joyce Kornbluh and Philip S. Foner, both of whom wrote standard works on the history of the IWW, when working on their film.

In addition to the contacts with the Wobbly veterans among the theater viewers, Bird and Shaffer tried to get access to other veterans of the movement through left-wing newspapers and magazines, scientists, oral history projects and also old people's homes. It remained unsuccessful. B. the search for miners, who had played an important role in the early history of the IWW. Bird and Shaffer suspected that many of them died early due to typical occupational diseases.

According to the directors' wishes, the successes that the IWW had achieved in bringing together white and black workers should also be reflected in the film. For months, a Communist Party friend of Bird and Shaffer's distributed leaflets in the Philadelphia shipyards asking about the ancestors of black workers who might have been wobblies. In this way the contact with the ex-dock worker James Fair, who appeared in the film, was established.

The Berkeley- based Radical Elders Oral History Project, with which activists of the New Left tried to ascertain its historical roots in the crisis of the protest movement that had been felt since the mid-1970s, was also involved in conducting the interviews . "The Wobblies" also brought different generations together: a film team between the ages of 30 and 40 and veterans between 75 and 97. Their historical successes could, at least according to the assessment of REOHP researcher Richard Bermack, enlighten the New Left about their deficits: " It was as if the New Left were learning from the Old Left. "

Overall, the research for the film took several years, which is why the total cost of producing "The Wobblies" was around $ 180,000. Most of this amount was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Foundation. US $ 1,000 was also contributed by the film fund of the US auto workers' union UAW .

Political context

The Wobblies producers Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer themselves place their film in the context of the crisis of the New Left. "As activism declined in the 1960s, we felt the need to look to the origins of American radicalism." The fact that, in Stewart Bird's opinion, that radicalism was "as American as apple pie" must be seen in the face of efforts to distort the History urgently needs to be recalled.

Oral history proved to be a good link between the different political generations of the left in the 1970s, because it tied in with the grassroots democratic and organizational-critical impulses of the new left without denying the achievements of the older left. On the contrary, coming to terms with past struggles could even help to make defeats more bearable against the background of longer-term historical continuities.

The relative abundance of films made and broadcast about American labor and union history in the second half of the 1970s confirms this finding. "The Wobblies" is in the context of films such as Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning documentary " Harlan County USA " (1976), " Union Maids " (1976) by Jim Klein , "The Great Sit-Down" (1976) by Stephen Peet, Henry Martison's "Prairie Fire" (1977) and "Northern Lights" (1978), " Days of Heaven " (1978) by Terrence Malick, the Oscar-nominated documentary "With Babies and Banners" (1979) by Lorraine Gray and Jack Ofield's "The Molders of Troy" (1980).

Reception and criticism

On October 11, 1979, "The Wobblies" premiered at the New York Film Festival. Participation in the renowned competition was a breakthrough for the directors. “The invitation to the festival was an incredible breakthrough for us. It means that you get in touch with the major critics and distributors. You just get a lot of publicity and it's a shame that only a handful of films get that attention. "

Although the American Federation of Labor is clearly criticized in the film for its exclusive practice, the American trade union confederation invited the filmmakers to show "The Wobblies" at the November 1979 AFL-CIO Washington trade union day.

"The Wobblies" was initially panned in the New York cultural magazine The Village Voice . Their film critic Jim Hoberman accused Bird and Shaffer of primarily serving the need for "left nostalgia". With an article by Michael Atkinson from June 2006, however, the Village Voice retracted its criticism: “American high school students should be given an exam task to see the film. However, much of what they have learned would then evaporate. "

The New York Times criticized in its review that the film as such was far "less inspired" and passionate than its musical soundtrack and also "less great and melodramatic" than the posters shown. His conscientious manner and "loving research" probably serve the Wobblies' egalitarian concerns more than exaggerated rhetoric: "If the facts are presented as completely as in this case, it is easy to guess the feelings associated with them."

The historian Melvyn Dubovsky, author of a standard work on the history of the Industrial Workers of the World, came to the opposite conclusion. He also found words of praise for the “moving interviews”, which, like the songs, expressed the romanticism and the spirit of a current that could not be killed. The approach to academic history, which the film strives for, but has not always achieved, makes it only of limited use for educational work. In order to stimulate viewers to think or just to leave a lasting impression on them, the "fact-ion" format, which tends to be elegiac obituary, is too worn out. At best, it helps to create the impression that the circumstances that created the Wobblies are also a thing of the past with their defeat. “Filmmakers, playwrights, and novelists shouldn't obey the rules, conventions, and constraints of academic historiography too much. Instead, perhaps they should better endeavor to create transcendent works of art. "

The Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization MARHO found that the directors of the documentary had wrongly given state repression a higher priority for the failure of the IWW than internal contradictions. Voices from the general audience, on the other hand, were surprised at how unknown the historical contexts presented in the film were to the US public. The interviewed Wobblies themselves mostly thought the film was a well-made contribution to the history of the class strife in the USA. Only one was concerned that the documentation might look too much like an obituary. According to Bird / Shaffer, many trade unionists and left-wing activists among the audience would have liked to see the film conveyed more information about the history of the IWW and its contemporary context.

See also

literature

  • Stewart Bird / Dan Georgakas / Deborah Shaffer: Solidarity Forever. An Oral History of the IWW, Chicago 1985
  • Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, pp. 14-19 & 58
  • Peter Robilotta / Stewart Bird: The Wobblies: The US vs. Wm. D. Haywood, et al. Introduction by Joyce Kombluh. Brooklyn: The Smyrna Press, 1980, xviii, 58 pp.
  • Philip S. Foner: History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol. 4: The Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1917, New York 1965.
  • Philip S. Foner / Reinhard Schultz: The other America. History, Art and Culture of the American Labor Movement, West Berlin 1986

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Philip S. Foner / Reinhard Schultz: The other America. History, art, and culture of the American labor movement, West Berlin 1986, pp. 191–192.
  2. ^ Philip Foner: History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol. 4: The Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1917, New York 1965, p. 29.
  3. ^ Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, pp. 14-19 & 58
  4. ↑ Stewart Bird / Dan Georgakas / Deborah Shaffer: Solidarity Forever. An Oral History of the IWW, Chicago 1985.
  5. ↑ http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/groups/gtext.php3?id=94
  6. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0787304/
  7. ↑ Janet Maslin: Home Free All. A Radical Grows Old. In: New York Times. May 2, 1984, accessed December 4, 2013 .
  8. ^ A b Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, p. 16
  9. ↑ Peter Robilotta / Stewart Bird: The Wobblies: The US vs. Wm. D. Haywood, et al. Introduction by Joyce Kombluh. Brooklyn: The Smyrna Press, 1980, xviii, 58 pp.
  10. ^ A b c John Demeter: Independent Film & Working Class History. A Review of 'Northern Lights' & 'The Wobblies', in: Radical America 1/1980, pp. 17-26.
  11. ↑ Joyce L. Kornbluh: Rebel Voices. To IWW Anthology, Ann Arbor 1972; Philip S. Foner: History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol. 4: The Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1917, New York 1965.
  12. ^ Richard Brenneman, Berkeley Author Offers Portraits of Spanish Civil War Vets. In: The Berkeley Daily Planet. April 26, 2005, accessed December 4, 2013 .
  13. ^ Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, p. 19.
  14. ^ Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980.
  15. ↑ Bird cited. based on John Demeter: Independent Film & Working Class History. A Review of 'Northern Lights' & 'The Wobblies', in: Radical America 1/1980, pp. 17-26.
  16. ↑ Quoted from Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, p. 19.
  17. ^ John Demeter: Independent Film & Working Class History. A Review of 'Northern Lights' & 'The Wobblies', in: Radical America 1/1980, p. 26.
  18. ↑ Michael Atkinson: Remember the Industrial Workers of the World? June 20, 2006, accessed December 4, 2013 .
  19. ↑ Janet Maslin: Facts and Propaganda in 'The Wobblies'' 'One Big Union'. In: The New York Times. Village Voice, October 11, 1979, accessed December 4, 2013 .
  20. ^ Melvyn Dubovsky: Film as history. History as drama. Some comments on “The Wobblies”, a play by Stewart Bird and Peter Robilotta, and “The Wobblies”, a film by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Labor History 1/1981, pp. 136–140.
  21. ^ Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, p. 17.
  22. ^ A b Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, p. 15.
  23. ^ Dan Georgakas: The Wobblies: The Making of a Historical Documentary. An Interview with Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, in: Cineaste 2/1980, p. 18.