“Shut up and sing”, an angry fan shouted at the Dixie Chicks in the tumult that followed the group’s negative remarks about President Bush. From that shout comes the title for Barbara Kopple’s latest film.
Director/Producer Kopple is no stranger to the documentary form: she has two Oscars for earlier work — one for Harlan County, USA (1976), a film about the coal field strikes in Kentucky in 1973, one for American Dream (1991), a work about a strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Minnesota in 1986. Shut Up and Sing (2006) (co-directed by Cecilia Peck) is about the Dixie Chicks, and the latest film to document the relationship between film, American politics, and the ongoing dialogue we periodically seem to have with popular culture.
The old adage says politics and art make strange bedfellows. But political films have long been a solid Hollywood genre, and recently have served to re-invigorate the feature-length documentary form. The ‘60s saw a flowering of films that embraced political issues. Currently, there is a stream of work from Hollywood narrative films as well as from independent film and video. In America, we wear our politics on our screens.
Film has arguably been the dominant art form of the 20th century. It has also been an interesting source for thinking about American material culture. From time to time, film gives us a reflection of who and where we are at particular moments. It does not lead the way, but for better or worse, it often captures what we are thinking and talking about. One topic on many American minds right now is an unpopular war. But since the Vietnam era, the last war Americans rejected, films have provided us eruptions of dissent from the screen.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s Hollywood gave us Dr. Strangelove (1964), Medium Cool (1969), Apocalypse Now (1979), MASH (1970), Catch 22 (1970), Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), Hearts and Minds (1974), as well as films that explicitly took on politics as subject matter: The Parallax View (1974), All the President’s Men (1976) and the underrated satire Nashville (1976). In addition, this era gave us a number of important works that reflected a cultural shift in America: Easy Rider (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Conversation (1974): all films that were not about politics per se, but were about American culture and values, and the changing cultural landscape. Many American film historians think of the mid – ‘60s through late ‘70s as the last great moment in American narrative filmmaking.
The stupor in creativity we saw in the 1980’s set in at the dawn of the Reagan era. It may have been “morning in America” for some, but in the arts, and notably in film, it seemed the death-knell for voices of opposition on the screen. We soon appeared to be fully immersed in an era where dissent was labeled disloyalty: a nightmare holdover from the dark days of McCarthyism. Liberalism and progressive thought became metaphorical four-letter words. The right carefully studied the ‘60s, and learned from its mistakes. By the second Bush era, theirs was the dominant voice, even as they tactically protested otherwise.
How did this impact our cinema? At best, mediocrity triumphed; at worst, an artistic flowering in a number of art forms shriveled. We can’t blame the Republicans for all of this. Collectively, we allowed ourselves to settle for less. We bought the tickets. And studios eager to make money as film audiences opted for other technologies have been only too happy to repeat formulas ad nauseam. The combination of a public bent on conspicuous consumption, a film industry whose bottom line more and more reflected its desperation to hold onto an audience turning elsewhere, and a conservative zeitgeist, have proven to dull our cinematic palette.
The Iraq war, and varied concerns about quality of life at home, have generated a wide response from our film and video-makers. Activist Michael Moore‘s documentaries are perhaps the best known (Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), but one could posit the reflective Good Night and Good Luck (2005), Three Kings (1999), Syriana (2005), Why We Fight (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Kopple’s own American Dream (1991).
Some walk a direct political path. Others have another agenda: they mean to give us something to think about. The world is not black and white, and our understanding of it can no longer afford to be.
Film may have been the art form of the 20th century; it is not likely to have that dominant role in the 21st. That could mean freedom for filmmakers. Images and words already reach us in so many different ways – and a global future that will literally make many voices feasible and possible, could bring a polyphony that would allow us all to sing.