Dispatch #6: Cinema Solidarity and the Politics of Popular Culture

June 16, 2025

Greetings from the Swamp.

It was a little after 7 pm, and we had to start directing attendees to an overflow movie theater since our original theater of nearly 50 seats had reached capacity for the screening of Union, a documentary that was short-listed for the Academy Award but had been shunned by commercial streaming services and theaters for fear of angering the behemoth, Amazon.

Why?

The film documented the formation of the first successful union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Such an example might help inspire a string of grassroots union campaigns at other Amazon facilities similar to what happened to the Starbuck Workers United union organizing campaign during the same period.

But before getting into our screening of Union here at Swamp University, a brief backstory of the influences that helped found the Solidarity Cinema Series that hosted the screening.

Popular culture has long been recognized as an important terrain of political struggle. As Stuart Hall wrote back in 1981: “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance.”

Such observations had been made possible since Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham had rediscovered Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist organizer and political theorist, whose Selections of the Prison Notebooks was translated into English in 1971. In them, Gramsci emphasized the importance of the cultural terrain for enabling political mobilization.  

Hall developed his Gramscian analysis throughout the 1980s in order to dissect the growing power of Thatcherism, a conservative populist movement taking hold in England. In particular, he found an important theoretical toehold in Gramsci’s concept of “common sense,” which is an unruly assemblage of philosophical beliefs and assumptions that “shapes our ordinary, practical, everyday calculation and appears as natural as the air we breathe.” The radical right of Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the United States “shifted the parameters of common sense. It has pioneered a considerable swing towards authoritarian populism and reactionary ideas.”

Needless to say, we occupy a similar moment in time. But instead of an authoritarian populism ushering in an emergent neoliberal order, it is now overseeing its transformation or demise, depending on who you ask.

It is worth noting, however, that popular culture’s centrality in fostering political struggle had been understood by various social movements long before Hall’s brilliant analysis of it. Michael Denning shows in The Cultural Front (1997) how the Popular Front during the 1930s created coalitions among a wide array of social movements and political groups to fight against fascism globally. In the United States, popular culture was mobilized in defense of pro-labor, anti-fascist, and anti-racist movements. Songs like Billie Holiday’s, “Strange Fruit,” films like Citizen Kane (1941), books like The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and musicals like The Cradle Will Rock (1939) all arose from Popular Front sensibilities.

More recently and directly relevant to the formation of our Solidarity Cinema Series, anti-colonial movements within South America, the Caribbean, and North Africa that flared throughout the 1950s and 1960s saw independent cinema as a crucial terrain to mobilize resistance. The films produced became collectively known as Third Cinema.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable documents to emerge from Third Cinema was “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969), written by two Argentinian filmmakers and theorists, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino.  The manifesto casts its gaze far beyond the limitations of film technology at the time to imagine what a truly liberatory cinema could be in terms of production, distribution, and exhibition. Two points worth highlighting that in part inspired our Solidarity Cinema Series are the following: 

1)     Film attendance is action: Attending a screening shifts an attendee from being a spectator into a participant. As the manifesto notes, “From the moment he [sic] decided

to attend the showing, from the moment he [sic] lined himself up on this side by taking

risks and contributing his [sic] living experience to the meeting, he [sic] became an actor,

a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the films.” One of the main

questions of a screening then becomes: how does one engage these participants after

the screening is over?

2)     The film is the catalyst, not the goal: Although the programming of film screenings is important, Solanas and Getino nonetheless suggest that films act mainly as “detonators”

or “pretexts” to transform screenings into “freedom-giving energy.” The screening is the

excuse for the gathering, the entry point. But unlike commercial theatrical screenings

where people gather as an aggregate of individuals and groups who then immediately

disperse afterwards, Third Cinema screenings must reconstitute its audience into a

collective body where forms of analysis, solidarity, and action can take place.

These two points take on revitalized meaning during the age of Zoom, social media, and growing authoritarian populism.

After two years of a pandemic where many people bunkered down behind their screens, a politics of presence takes on a new importance. People wanted to get out, meet, and socialize. A film screening, followed by a discussion afterwards, provides a perfect excuse to mingle in person once again.

Furthermore, people’s presence in a shared space offers a different dynamic and energy than online gatherings provide. As Svelta Turnin and Ezra Winton, who created and ran the successful Cinema Politica film series in Montreal, note: “a politics of presence becomes more about what bodies do in an activist screening space, where they go and what actions they take after the lights are turned back on . . . .”  It is easier to channel such energy when together and not occupying online space where every click and move is intimately tracked. Physical space serves as a partial antidote to digital surveillance capitalism.

Also, growing suburbanization and digitization has fragmented and disrupted many in person community spaces. This is not to say that some do not still remain or that online communities don’t have any value unto themselves. But in terms of building solidarity and fostering collective action, physical spaces still occupy a central importance that online organizing can only build from, not replace. As Kimberley Kinder suggests, such spaces can “unmoor people from allegiances to oppressive subjectivities and encourage identification with progressive alternatives.” They assist in the individual and collective reconfiguration of identities, which Stuart Hall has stressed are “never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” 

Popular culture serves as an important entry point in discussing and changing people’s political conception of the world and their sense of identity. It provides a familiar reference point where much of our common sense resides, which, according to Gramsci, must always be the starting point for critical interrogation. From there, new possibilities can emerge.

The Far Right has mobilized upon popular culture with a vengeance. They provide an array of white nationalist film criticism that seizes upon films as diverse as The Northman and Black Panther to reroute their meanings and symbols to support an ethno-nationalist, sexist, and capitalist worldview.

It is no coincidence that many Far Right activists and intellectuals have utilized Gramsci in strategizing their use of popular culture to movement build. The late Andrew Breitbart’s saying, “Politics is downstream from culture,” is essentially a Gramscian idea: in order to provide a fundamental change to politics, one must first disrupt and reorder the cultural terrain. Steve Bannon, a pupil of Breitbart’s, has deployed this strategy by using cinema and, more recently and effectively, podcasting to change hearts and minds.

In light of all this, Karen Leader, Jessica Dickson, another anonymous faculty member, and I have established the Solidarity Cinema Series. We use our campus film theaters to program a range of films, from classics to contemporary films that have not received wide distribution but speak to the current moment. All the screenings are followed by a discussion where a cluster of featured people (students, faculty, community members, creative talent, etc.) lead it.

We provide free food during each screening. This not only encourages turnout, but also implicitly recognizes the food insecurity that many of our students face. We do not care whether it is the promise of free food or a good film that draws people to our event. Both reasons are equally justified.

Solidarity is not only nurtured through the screening and discussion, but also through programming. We insist that groups and individuals that had not partnered with one another in the past collaborate in developing a screening and discussion. As a result, we create new connections through the planning of the screening as well as during the screening itself. The Solidarity Cinema Series committee assists in these efforts as needed.

Our committee’s ultimate goal is for us to vet and facilitate screenings brought to us by community members, students, and other faculty. We would like community programming to replace our own since this would allow others to gain a sense of collective agency through it. We have not yet reached that goal. But we are working towards it.

Our Union screening is informative in illustrating how the series works. The screening appealed to the various institutional collaborators with our series: School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, The Center for Peace, Justice, and Human Rights, and United Faculty of Florida, our faculty union. Screening a documentary that received no commercial distribution aligned with our School of Comm’s mission to highlight independent productions. The film’s subject matter about founding a union among workers from a diverse background appealed to both The Center and our union.

We scheduled the screening two weeks before a campus union membership drive. One of our key organizers briefly spoke to the audience after the film ended and before the discussion period. We hoped to encourage more people to participate in the drive as well as inspire those who already signed up to get excited for it. (Our faculty union covered the entire cost of the event in order to keep university money and meddling out of it).

For the discussion, we invited Stephen Maing, one of the film’s directors, to participate via Zoom, and Zack Boff, an organizer who was unionizing the warehouses he worked. Boff had formerly tried to organize an Amazon warehouse in Broward county before being laid off.

Sixty-five people turned up for the screening, forcing us to use an overthrow theater. The audience was mostly comprised of students and faculty, but we have around ten to fifteen outside community members who attended due to word of mouth. After the screening, Maing answered questions about the ethics and practices of making the film and collaborating with members of the Amazon Labor Union. Boff spoke eloquently about workplace struggles and steps in forming a new union. Community members asked why the film was being banned from commercial theaters and platforms.

Conversations continued long after the screening. Students in my classes who attended the screening wanted to discuss the film. Many expressed amazement that they were so ignorant about how Amazon operated, a corporation that they all utilize but never questioned.

A few weeks later Zack Boff reached out to our faculty union about collaborating in the South Florida Workers’ Forum, which I wrote about in a previous post. During that event, we mentioned the Solidarity Cinema Series, which interested a whole host of new people in attending and perhaps programming.

Because of our contacts from the forum, we are currently speaking with some immigrant rights organizers about collaborating around a screening that features two film shorts on immigrant communities from Haiti and North Africa. We hope to invite the filmmaker of one of the shorts to the screening. Given the urgency of immigration issues nationally as Trump deploys troops to Los Angeles against mostly peaceful protesters as well as campus police from various Florida universities signing agreements with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), we can’t imagine a more pressing subject for the Solidarity Cinema Series to address.

In terms of the larger mediascape, our Solidarity Cinema Series might seem like a small drop in the bucket. But locally it provides a critical space for us to foster a sense of community for those in pursuit of some free food, good films, and engaging conversations. Through our screenings, we hope to create new connections and possibilities. It reminds us of the promise that Solanas and Getino made back in 1969 to create a cinema “fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming.” If the Solidarity Cinema Series can be a small part of that legacy, then it will have well served its purpose. 

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