John Gianvito’s Profit motive and the whispering wind is that rare lumbering giant of experimental cinema that through force of good will manages to boil to the edge of consciousness in the film world, gifted a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives. It has not been an overwhelming financial success, as one I suppose can expect: at tonight’s 7pm screening, I counted nine viewers. One left five minutes in.

It is, as you’ve been told, a 58 minute meditation on an alternative history of the United States, following the gravestones, monuments, and sites, humble, large, neglected, and venerated, that memorialize figures and events in the history of American leftist causes. Drawing on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Gianvito cuts beautiful images of the American landscape, trees constantly swaying in the forceful breeze (Gianvito could teach M. Night Shyamalan a thing or two about how to make shots of the wind coursing through greenery seem exciting) between images of these monuments, with occasional punctuations of crude line rotoscoping of traders on the NYSE floor, and a crazed, hyperactive final five minutes that gives illustration of the boisterous life behind the tranquility of these half-forgotten monuments to mostly forgotten pioneers for human rights and draws a direct line between direct action of the past and anti-corporate and anti-war protests today.

I greatly admired the film - I found it incredibly moving in its use of still landscape shots and tight, rhythmic editing. Its use of found sounds - both recorded on site and a handful of recordings from pioneers of American leftism like Paul Robeson - was stirring without easy manipulation. It may seem overly schematic in its formal simplicity and unwavering emphasis on chronology, but this simplicity reveals both the decisiveness of Gianvito’s vision of American history and the notion that various ideological movements which have been made fractional by the last few decades’ worth of discourse - the women’s movement, environmentalism, the labor movement, gay rights, the movements toward racial and ethnic equality - are worth considering as a whole, as many parts of the same history.

On the other hand, I cannot say I’m a huge admirer of the film Anthology has coprogrammed with it, a leaden bit of hippie self-mythologizing called New Left Note by radical filmmaker and journalist Saul Levine. Levine’s film is an amalgam of once-vogue techniques, splicing hand-processed, chemically degraded and dyed 8mm images of television screens of Moments in American Hegemony (Nixon, Johnson, Neil Armstrong on the moon), campus protests, and images of the filmmaker’s friends and his girlfriend’s ass into a sub-Brakhage subliminal clusterfuck of visual noise. Where Gianvito’s film allows room for breath, Levine’s is stunted and adolescent, paying no mind to its audience, droning doctrinally for 29 minutes, and insisting dogmatically on its mode of address in a way that matches perfectly with the stubborn New Left of the late 70s and early 80s that produced it. As a formal contraption, it’s undeniably considered; it’s entirely of a piece, but a piece of what I dare not say.

It’s a quote I pull out a lot, but I think it’s useful here again: