Projectors and Propaganda
- By JB Revell
I’ve eaten a bad hamburger that left me gripping the toilet seat for 48 hours, and I’ve sat through more than one three-hour black-and-white Soviet film without subtitles. Both experiences left me reeling—but only one of them made me feel like I’d just peeked behind a curtain I was never meant to look beyond.
Real, revolutionary cinema—the kind that kicks you in the teeth and leaves you bleeding onto your popcorn, or just sits there, calm and cold, while your sense of reality quietly unravels—doesn’t give a damn if you’re comfortable. It doesn’t ask permission. It shows up drunk to dinner, reeking of cigarettes, high on cocaine, spits on the new rug, and dares you to tell it to leave.
Confucius once said something about real eyes realizing real eyes. Or maybe that was just a stoned drifter posing as a student, muttering in the back of a seminar at my underfunded public college. Doesn’t matter. The truth is in there somewhere—buried under celluloid and propaganda, caked with congealed blood and nitrate dust. The “kino eye” isn’t the real eye. But the real eye? It’s the one that makes you wonder if everyone you know has been lying to you your whole life—unaware they were even lying in the first place.
Russian, Cuban, French, American—revolutionary cinema isn’t just one flavor. It’s not a tidy little genre you can pair with a Cabernet and a Netflix subscription. It’s messy. Amorphous. It pisses on the walls of convention and laughs when the fire catches.
Revolutionary cinema is not a genre. It’s not neat. It’s not clean.
Studying neo-colonialism can feel like being waterboarded with academic jargon. So if you'd rather keep sipping the spoon-fed dopamine, otherwise known as industrialized Hollywood entertainment—washed down with overpriced NASCAR soda—I won’t stop you.
Seriously. Tap out. Go bask in the glow of your screen.
The rest of us? We’re going deeper than that indie girl who sits behind you in class and posts on Letterboxd. Past vibes. Past trauma chic. Into the marrow—because it’s our damned duty, as curtain-pullers, as truth-seekers, as those who refuse to look away, to look, then look again, until the distractions that’ve kept us blind unravel in the face of something real.
Still here?
Good. Because this isn’t just about cinema. It’s about training your brain to punch through the drywall of your curated little life. It’s about empathy—stepping into someone else’s skin, tasting their sweat, hearing—no, seeing—the soundtrack to their oppression.
We get distracted by the rule of thirds and continuity errors when the real question is:
Why is the protagonist’s world the way it is?
Who built it?
Who benefits from it staying that way?
Who built it?
Who benefits from it staying that way?
And guess what? You’ll never have all the answers. Every opinion should come with a side of doubt. Philosophers called it thinking. I call it living with awareness. Watch something weird. Watch something that punches your worldview in the gut and leaves you questioning, not what’s on the whiteboard in your next class, but why you need to go to that damn class in the first place. Watch something that doesn’t give a damn if you “like” it. Watch something new.
You want to see behind the walls? Get educated. But not in the pay-your-loans-and-barely-pass kind of way. Learn through stories. Real ones. Ones filmed on stolen cameras and censored before they could be seen by any factory worker. If you’re reading this, congrats—you have the internet. Think about that. Then think about what systems are in place to keep you from thinking.
If vulnerability to change is your greatest fear, then you’re in a pretty good place. Have you ever bathed your child in a river? Have you ever smelled your own flesh burning from napalm, screaming in agony as you run naked down the street? Have you ever killed members of your community as an act of revolt against your oppressor?
No?
Good. But let that discomfort sit with you. That’s your brain waking up. Much like a muscle in a cast, the atrophy you’re experiencing is the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Salt of the Earth wasn’t just blacklisted—it was feared. Not because it screamed, “Your government doesn’t like you!” but because it whispered it. It dared to show human struggle without polishing it for the Sunday matinee crowd. That’s what revolutionary cinema does. It doesn’t explode—it seeps. It infects.
And when the system trembles because of a film? You know it hit the mark.
Revolutionary cinema isn’t about fight scenes and martyrdom arcs. It’s about the slow burn of injustice. It’s about context. It’s about looking at a strike not as a plot device, but as a survival instinct. When you watch Soy Cuba, you’re not just watching—you’re sweating. You’re there. And that’s the point.
With their last peso, the children sip Coca-Cola made from the sugar their father bled to harvest. That’s not a metaphor—it’s a goddamn indictment.
Eisenstein’s Strike? It’s not subtle. It’s a brick through the living room window. It shows you the machine and then shows you which gear you are. Montage wasn’t just a stylistic hoorah to cement the film in cinematic history—it was a weapon. Editing as resistance. Shot after shot like a heartbeat of dissent.
You want to talk about Symphony of a Great City? Good luck. Most people don’t get its message—and that’s okay. No narrator. No tidy three-act arc. Just Berlin, pulsing like blood from a wound. Ruttmann made the city the main character. Machines grinding. People marching. And somewhere in that chaos, a truth you can’t quite name. Walter Ruttmann didn’t hand you a story. He handed you a mirror.
Trotsky once said cinema should shape ideology the way churches shape belief. Symphony does just that. It doesn’t care if you’re confused. That’s the point. That’s what makes it revolutionary.
The city moves like a piston. The people like cogs. If that doesn’t scare you, watch it again.
Revolutionary cinema isn’t just about making a point—it’s about confronting the viewer with raw, uncomfortable truths. Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien doesn’t just step back from traditional narrative—it practically moonwalks away, leaving the seams of the production bare. You see the set walls slide open like a dollhouse. The camera wobbles. The illusion collapses. And that’s the point. Godard wanted you to notice the flaws, to see the construction, because being transfixed is a trap. By breaking the cinematic spell, he forces the audience to wake up—to realize the illness not just in the film, but in the world it reflects. It’s a rupture—a refusal to let cinema sedate you. It’s not just postmodern cleverness. It’s political revolt, like the uprisings of May 68.
Films like Soy Cuba and Symphony of a Great City pull no punches in showing the struggles of the oppressed. Similarly, In the Year of the Pig doesn’t just critique the Vietnam War—it pulls back the curtain, with found footage, showing you the carnage and hypocrisy with a camera that doesn’t flinch, leaving you no choice but to see the ugliness for what it is. This is the kind of cinema that challenges the way we think and feel about the world, refusing to allow us to look away.
Can film capture truth? Who knows. Does that question even matter? Maybe the search for an answer is the answer. Trotsky believed film should educate, not sedate.
Soy Cuba doesn’t play by the rules. Du Bois, I can only assume, would’ve eaten it up. It’s revolution without narration, liberation without apology. The oppressed don’t need a narrator—they’ve had one shoved down their throats for centuries. The film says: “Watch. Feel. Then think about your neighbor’s pool and Corvette as a spinning circle, a watch swinging back and forth, trying to stop you from waking up from the hypnotism.”
You should be uncomfortable. That means it’s working.
It’s a camera that burns. It’s poetry in a war zone. It’s a sugarcane field cut with a razor’s edge.
Revolutionary cinema is not about popcorn and post-credit scenes. It’s about waking the hell up. It’s not safe. It’s not fun. But it’s necessary.
Your government wants you sedated. Your algorithms want you docile. Revolutionary films want you pissed off, inspired, and thinking twice before swallowing what you're fed.
“So what does all this mean for me?” you might ask. I guess I’ve realized that film isn’t just something you watch—it’s something that watches back. That’s what revolutionary cinema demands. Not to be agreed with, not even to be liked—but to be felt, and maybe even feared. It cracks something open in you, if you let it.
Maybe that’s the real revolution: when you stop watching just to escape, and start watching to understand. Not for trivia night or some Letterboxd review, but because it might actually change how you see your place in the world. If film is the eye, then revolutionary cinema is the cataract surgery. Let it hurt. Then look again.
There’s no tidy ending here. No lesson that wraps itself up in a bow. Just this:
Cinema isn’t supposed to make you feel good. Not always. Sometimes it’s supposed to make you angry. Sad. Confused. Sometimes it’s supposed to make you question everything.
So the next time you sit down to watch a movie, ask yourself:
Is this comforting me?
Or is this confronting me?
Is this comforting me?
Or is this confronting me?
And if it’s the second one—good. Pour a drink. Watch closely. Ask questions. You just might learn something.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S. If you like chess, watch Chess Fever by Pudovkin. It won’t explain revolution, but it might just unravel the madness behind it.