Review: Fourth World War rekindles the global rebellion in our hearts and souls
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This is the most gripping, the broadest ranging, the most inspiring movie about the last decade of worldwide struggle I've ever seen. Tight editing keeps it moving, but it manages still to linger on faces and their expression, on reasons and their history, on momentary fragments that conjure a living, breathing whole that any of us inside the movement can recognize. And despite narratives woven from movements in South Africa, Argentina, Chiapas, Palestine, South Korea, and Iraq (as well as Genoa, Quebec, and New York) you'll recognize your kinship with a world in rebellion.
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It's easy to get discouraged. Despite massive organizing on many continents, CNN and CBS and MSNBC bathe us in unruffled fast-cut highlights ("now with more statistics!"). The gleaming seamless suture of self and society in streamlined virtual commodity consumption demands not faith but distraction; an always easier allegiance. Despite the shocking rupture of 9/11, and even as the whole world changes, we seem to be irrelevant. We want to change the world! But we feel alone, isolated, fragmented.
Fourth World War(*) is a spine-tingling soul-stirring tear-jerking shock treatment for the American Myopia. Awake! arise! rejoice! for you are not alone. Around the world and for many centuries, the most courageous and beautiful of our sisters and brothers have lived and died for another, better world; in every act and moment of rebellion, we are their comrades. By this film, this close-shot participant-observer moving-target POV from a handful of the world's most intense contemporary movements, we get to meet them.
It's a sobering introduction. We can hardly resurrect the rose-lit triumphalist euphoria of several generations ago: over and over, despite apparent victories, our movements have have been coopted or crushed. If in the largely kid-glove internal security structure of the US, it sometimes seemed that direct action was a game, in Argentina 30,000 were disappeared; amidst South Korea's street battles, self-immolation is a form of struggle; in Palestine the soldiers slaughter children.
Eventually, there is no honest way to avoid the magnitude of the Empire's violence. Big Noise don't try; their gutwrenching long shots of death and mourning will penetrate the callused conscience of even the most gore-fest inured. But immediately we are offered the courage of a generation that dances anyway, fierce on the sword-edge of despair and devastation: South Africans occupying courtrooms again; Zapatistas evicting an army barracks by pelting them with mud; and "black-clad anarchists" tearing down the fence in Quebec. Those who repress us have guns, and tanks, and helicopters; they can kill us, we know for sure. But our love of life and the world will not allow us to give up: we are all memories of David, casting with our slingshots little stones against the tracks and armor.
We need those stones, not because they will somehow slay the giant, but because they somehow keep our spirits alive. By coming together to defy the total power of a system of mostly self-enforced obedience, we recognize in each other the seeds of transformation. Perhaps you were in Seattle, or at May Day, or were here when Bush came to town. Maybe you sat at Eagle Creek, or struck with Powell's, or shut down 84. You remember the glorious sense of collective action, of people from many different paths coming together to make of a piece of the world, for a moment, liberation. Fourth World War asks you to step beyond the confines of race and class geography and recognize your always-already kinship with the revolutionaries of the world.
"I am the Other! I am everyone!" shout the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina. Beyond the pale of imperial control, we inhabit a shadow world of many worlds. These worlds differ greatly: tribes of re-newed indigeneity, urban subcultures, revolutionary brigades; and it is counterproductive to demand or concoct an abstract "unity." Yet we are kin, because in opposition to the machinic System we are together creating spaces in which a thousand flowers bloom.
Privilege and resources (whether purchased on credit or dived from the dumpster) make an enormous difference. The terrains, and thus the motivations and strategies of struggle, are very different between the "white middle class" plurality in this country (that works so hard to advertise itself into perceived universality) and the poor brown discarded majority of the world. Any successful solidarity between them will deeply understand the complexities (psychosocial and material) articulated by those differences.
But the work of this movie is something else: to remind us that everyone can find joy in smashing up the state! The piqueteros are rightly proud of their monkeywrenching tactical obstruction of the arteries of trade; and no one can forget the bright-faced singing grit of the women in Mandela Park after unarresting their comrades; yet the moment with most emapathetic relevance for our drizzly, mundane city (as we watch the worker ants stream into a glistening corporate extrusion) is surely the relentless volcanic rage as tie-necked suited underlings and reps tore apart the ATMs and storefront banks of Buenos Aires. The look of feral jubilation I saw in their eyes as they started gently to dance reminds me that even, especially, in this plastic-coated climate-conditioned cage, the roots of rhythm remain, ready to burst the dams.
If shocked, awed out of the pretense of normalcy, we all know that. Deeper down, we are human beings faced with the greatest challenges our species has ever faced. We can, we must find strength in the beauty and courage of our comrades around the world.
Like nothing else I've ever seen, Fourth World War gives you the chance. See it on the big screen!
Co-sponsored by a variety of local activist groups and coalitions, each of which will host a different screening. Portland premiere this Thurday, Feb 26, 7pm and 9pm at the Clinton Street Theatre (at SE 26th St). Running there from Feb 28 through March 4 at 7pm and 9pm. See www.bignoisefilms.com for advance tickets, trailer, and to get involved.
(*) Fourth, because the contemporary war for outright global power by the biggest forms of capital is a new war after the end of the "Cold" Third proxy-fought, brutally violent World War; after the Zapatista usage.
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Can we get this as a feature...and can you put add it to events at top of page.. We all need to get out and see this....It's being held at the Clinton Street theatre. Big noise productions did a great job of waking up the world about what Seattle was all about. It's time to get out from in front of the computer and make community with like-minded people.
The Revolution is already here!