Salt of the Earth Movie 1954 Review Essay

JUMP Cut
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Ideology and structure in
Salt of the Earth

by Deborah Rosenfelt

from Jump Cut, no. 12/13, 1976, pp. 19-22. Copyright 1976, Debby Rosenfelt . Reprinted hither past permission of the author.

Recently I saw Salt OF THE Earth as it was meant to exist seen, in a darkened theater in 35 mm. Through the efforts of Sonja Dahl, manager Herbert Biberman's sister-in-law, a special showing had been arranged at ane of Los Angeles' Lammle theaters, every bit function of the Emerging Women series. Many of us had seen the film before in l6 mm and had been moved by it, fifty-fifty though the often pirated prints were technically flawed, parts of the audio runway almost inaudible. Now every word was clear. Later on the second showing, writer Michael Wilson rose to answer questions. The packed theater gave him a sustained standing ovation. The adulation welcomed both Wilson and SALT OF THE EARTH back from the shadowy earth of the blacklisted; it also best-selling the merit of the film.

There are many things to exist said nigh the film(1). I want to focus here on the relation between its credo and its structure. The standing significance of Salt OF THE Globe for our own time arises from its attempt—rare in works of fine art in whatsoever medium—to integrate the struggles of women, of an ethnic minority, and workers. The upshot of "sectoral" struggles based on nationalism, feminism, ethnicity and their relation to form struggle has always been a cause for contend in left political movements, today more than always. Stanley Aronowitz's statement in 1973 could accept been written to sum up the theme of SALT OF THE Globe, fabricated twenty years before:

"The contradiction of working class struggle today is that it must recognize the demands of different oppressed groups ... and simultaneously strive for a unified form identity that transcends the prevailing system."(2)

Esperanza puts the case for sectoral struggles rather more dramatically in her climactic confrontation with Ramon:

"Why are you lot afraid to have me at your side? Do you however think y'all tin can have nobility just if I have none? ... The Anglo bosses await down on you, and yous hate them for information technology. 'Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican'—that's what they tell y'all. But why must y'all say to me, 'Stay in your place.' Do you lot feel ameliorate having someone lower than you? ... Whose neck shall I stand on to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don't want anything lower than I am. I'm low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with we as I go. ... And if y'all tin't empathise this you're a fool—because you tin can't win this strike without me: You can't win anything without me!"

Salt OF THE EARTH, of course, is not social science; it is art. It does not analyze the interaction of these struggles; it does centrally nowadays that interaction. In refusing to assign priorities to these struggles either in importance or in time (e.thousand., first the workers, then the women, or vice versa), the film acknowledges their frequently uneasy contemporaneousness in life.

At times in the film, these struggles—against racism, sexism, the unchecked power of the ruling class—converge and coagulate. At times they disharmonize (or seem to conflict) with one some other. Where they conflict, the mining community becomes divided against itself. Where they converge, at that place is unity. The film's power equally a narrative and visual construction comes largely from its acknowledgement and apply of that blueprint of conflict and convergence, of division and of unity.(3) The design itself reflects the contending social forces of that fourth dimension and place. The film depicts the inevitable animosity betwixt labor and direction, the long history of tension betwixt Mexican American and Anglo, and the more recent tension between the women and the men as the women's picket line altered their roles and consciousness at different rates.

The opening scenes institute almost immediately the conflict betwixt the women and the men, and the apparent disharmonize between the bug of the women and the problems of the men. The photographic camera shows both Esperanza and Ramon at work. Esperanza is chopping wood, conveying it to the burn down, scrubbing the wearing apparel, hanging the wash, tending the children. Ramon is lighting fuses of dynamite in the darkness of the mine shaft. It suggests the difficulty and significance of both kinds of work. Yet initially the conflict between Ramon and Esperanza centers on their mutual failure to understand the extent and source of 1 another's feelings of oppression:

Esperanza (timidly): What's more than important than sanitation?

Ramon (flaring): The safety of the men—that's more important: Five accidents this week—all because of speed-up. You lot're a woman, y'all don't know what information technology's like up in that location. ... First we got to go equality on the job. Then we'll work on these other things. Leave it to the men.

Esperanza (quietly): I see. The men. You'll strike, maybe, for your demands—but what the wives desire, that comes later, always later.

Ramon (darkly): flow don't get-go talking confronting the union again.

Esperanza (a shrug of defeat): What has it got me, your union?

Ramon: Esperanza, have you forgotten what it was like... before the union came? (Points toward parlor.) When Estrella was a babe, and we couldn't even afford a medico when she got sick? Information technology was for our families: We met in graveyards to build that wedlock:

Esperanza (lapsing into agony): All correct. Have your strike. I'll have my babe. ..."

Her prediction is fulfilled in the montage sequence, where the editing juxtaposes Ramon's being beaten with Esperanza's childbirth, unattended by a medico because none will come to the lookout line. Yet this scene is 1 of confluence rather than conflict. Again, the nature of their specific oppression differs. But in calling out for one some other, they limited their bond with 1 another—a bond of love as well every bit shared oppression. The editing underlines the commonality of their struggles. We know what they are fighting against and what they are fighting for. Both learn during the form of the picture show that, though their needs may differ, they can demand redress only if they join forces. The difficulty—and the source of the moving-picture show's greatest dramatic tension—is that they learn this lesson in dissimilar means and at unlike rates.

In the terminal sequence both script and camera emphasize the coalescence of the different struggles, the forging of a "unified class identity." That sequence is literally one of convergence, the spatial reflecting the political, as streams of people pour toward the scene of the eviction. Initially we see simply a few people at la casa de Quintero, the members of the customs of women with whom we are almost familiar—Esperanza, Luz, Mrs. Salazar—and the children. Gradually others join them, the women flagging down cars, the men arriving in Jenkins' car and the union truck. The crowd swells increasingly with still other women walking down from the surrounding hills, with the "guys from the open pit" (a reference to the copper mining operation at nearby Santa Rita), with "the guys from the manufacturing plant" (down the road some ten miles in Hurley). The children throw dirt clods at the deputies, spontaneously initiating an effective diversionary tactic in a general and organic motion of resistance.

The treatment of two objects in this sequence deserves detail mention. Ane is Ramon's gun; the other, the portrait of Benito Juárez. Throughout the film each has accumulated an iconic significance. The negative image of the gun and the positive image of the portrait each concentrate elements from at to the lowest degree ii of the picture show'due south main ideological thrusts.

Guns in the pic, in addition to serving their literal function, become images both for a crude machismo and for the power of the ruling course. At times that usage seems nearly too obvious, as in the frame filled by the holster and gun on the hips of the deputy Vance, who after taunts the female picketers in an obvious (though entirely believable) double entendre: "Hey, girls. Don't y'all wanta run across my pistol?" At times it is more subtle. In the barroom scene, when the men are feeling most pessimistic, they notice a news photo of the visitor's possessor, in his guise equally Corking White Hunter, clothed for the safari with his gun across his lap. The men, with the false consciousness that apes ruling class activities as a substitute for genuine power, decide that they too volition go hunting, a decision arising directly from their sense of helplessness.

During well-nigh of the climactic confrontation scene betwixt Esperanza and Ramon, when Esperanza is at her strongest and Ramon at his weakest, most defensive and potentially nearly brutal, Ramon cradles, cleans, oils and loads his rifle for the hunt. At this point the disharmonize between the dissimilar struggles—similar the conflict between the two protagonists—seems greatest. To Ramon—although not to Esperanza and the audience—the women's insistence on equality seems utterly irreconcilable with his own need for respite in the dwelling from his struggles at the workplace. He raises his hand to strike Esperanza. It is an exercise of male person power akin to his absorption with the rifle and a gesture plainly familiar if non habitual. She stiffens in defiance, ordering him never to threaten her physically again.

"That would be the quondam way."

And she retires to sleep alone. The gulf between the two of them every bit individuals seems unbridgeable. So for a moment does the gulf between the rising of the women and the struggles of the workers in their exclusively male occupation.

Only during the hunt, phrases from Esperanza's impassioned statement repeat in Ramon'southward mind:

"I don't desire to go downwardly fighting. I want to win. (Pause) Have y'all learned zero from this strike?"

A gunshot marks the point of his decisive turnabout. And in the final sequence he half raises his rifle, and so thrusts it aside, handing information technology to Mrs. Salazar. The action suggests, through before accretions of pregnant, a rejection of the masculine mystique and of ruling course methods for maintaining power. Literally information technology represents a rejection of an individualistic, suicidal modality for social activity against the bosses. He foregoes the explosive but finally ineffectual anger of some of his earlier confrontations. Having finally understood the lesson Esperanza learned first, he says,

"Now we can all act together, all of us."

And they do, the women reversing the eviction with the same esprit de corps they have brought to the picket line and the jail, the men for the first time backing them effectively, with the sheer weight of their numbers and determination.

The photograph of Benito Juárez, the Zapotec Indian who became one of Mexico'south greatest leaders, is a positive epitome, evoking a heritage of resistance to imperialism from abroad and reaction at home. We already know its significance from an earlier scene, the encounter between Ramon and Frank Barnes at the card tabular array. In that scene Ramon accuses Frank, though not in so many words, of racism. The charge is twofold: Frank thinks Mexican Americans are "too lazy to take the initiative," and he is ignorant of Mexican American history. He has shown his ignorance by failing to place Juárez. Ramon, telling him that Juárez was the begetter of Mexico, adds,

"If I didn't know a picture of George Washington, yous'd say I was an awful impaired Mexican."

Frank denies the first charge—that he thinks Mexicans are lazy—and the other men defend him. He accepts the charge of ignorance, agreeing that he has a peachy bargain to learn virtually Mexican American culture and history. In the tension between the two men we meet that ane of racism's consequences is to threaten the possibility for trust and friendship even between allies in the class struggle. Throughout, the film makes clear how the bosses manipulate racial antagonisms to obstruct unity betwixt the workers. Here, Frank's openness tentatively reestablishes trust. The pattern has moved briefly from conflict to convergence, as each of the men tries to come to terms with his own racism.

In the last sequence the friendly, educable ignorance of Frank Barnes is replaced by the hostility and destructiveness of the Anglo power construction and its agents. In this scene racism and capitalism dramatically reinforce one another. The sheriff and his deputies do the job because they are in the employ of the bosses. They enjoy their job because of their scorn for (and fear of) the people. They dump the precious portrait of Juárez on the route along with other possessions: the shrine to the Virgin, a doll, furniture. In a subsequent shot we run into a kicking damage the frame of the portrait. But when the eviction fails, each of the Quinteros takes a office in rescuing the portrait, and in the final shots Luis adjusts its frame before the family turns to enter its saved home. The young accept salvaged part of their heritage.

In the last frames the camera visually creates the image of unity summarized by Ramon's exact, "Now nosotros tin can all act together." It lingers on the faces of the oversupply gathered to lookout man and finally halt the eviction: the faces of women and men, of young and quondam, of Angle workers and Chicano workers. And so it draws back to show the crowd every bit a solid, dense mass. For a fourth dimension it focuses on Ramon and Esperanza on the steps of their house—the baby in Ramon's arms for the first time past his own choice. But the final filmic epitome is again of the people, as they leave the area. We must see Esperanza and Ramon as part of an entire community, their struggle representing and synthesizing the struggles of the community as a whole. The difficult-won unity is non permanent, nor is the victory, as Hartwell's, "Maybe we better settle this matter—for the present" makes ominously clear. But something significant has been won, an inheritance for the future, a sense of hope and confidence and power to pass on to the children. "And they," Esperanza's final voice over predicts, "the salt of the earth, shall inherit information technology." Esperanza, of course, means promise.

The conclusion is powerful, and considering the filmic construction has built up to it, it is too conceivable. Its power lies non but in the relief of narrative suspense—of knowing that the strike has been won and that the personal relation between Esperanza and Ramon has, at least "for the present," rejected the sometime way and avant-garde to a college plane of consciousness. It is also powerful as the last tonic chord of a musical limerick is powerful: relieving a structural tension. At last the entire working class community can all come up together in a shared political activeness, every bit before it could not. The disharmonize between the three unlike struggles is dramatically (if temporarily) resolved.

The relief of laughter, likewise, plays its part:

Sheriff (bellowing): Now run across hither, Quintero! These women are obstructin' justice. You make 'em behave, savvy?

Ramon: I tin't do nothing, sheriff.

You know how information technology is—they won't listen to a man whatever more than.

Ramon's line e'er brings down the firm. It is a deliberate parody of his own sometime sense of helplessness. The words are the same as words he might accept used earlier, but the pregnant is utterly different. The gulf between men and women, earlier the deepest source of conflict and hurting, has been transformed by a new consciousness into a weapon against a common enemy. Nosotros express joy with Ramon at the sheriff'southward discomfiture; nosotros besides laugh with relief at the transformation from point of conflict to bespeak of confluence. SALT OF THE EARTH, incidentally, is a very funny film, one of the few to use humor to deflate sexist pretensions.

In the concluding scenes, then, for one moment in fourth dimension, a single collective act combines a rejection of sexism and racism with resistance against the unadulterated power of the ruling class. Put another way, the temporary abeyance of sexism and racism within the community has enabled that resistance: a fact, not a formula. For a moment in time we empathise emotionally and intellectually the meaning of "unified grade identity."

Clearly the moving-picture show'south main thrust is toward this unified grade identity. Just SALT OF THE Globe is not, strictly speaking, a revolutionary film. That is, it does not explicitly urge workers to have command of the means of product. To do so would have been politically incommunicable and historically inaccurate. It does argue for a strong and democratic matrimony capable of wresting better working conditions from those who ain the means of production. And it does intimate that winning a single strike is no final victory, given the fundamental antagonism betwixt owners and workers. Class struggle figures prominently. Revolution does not.

As with form struggle, Table salt OF THE World'southward feminism, though pervasive, stops short of the radical. Ramon comes to understand how important and demanding household tasks are when he is forced to assume them during Esperanza's three days in jail. Simply certainly there is no criticism of the nuclear family unit itself and of the bones division of labor along the line of traditional sex roles. Still, we can be grateful that the movie presents housework, childcare and sanitation as fundamentally political issues. It takes its stand on the "adult female question" even more forcefully by its very option of a woman every bit both protagonist and central consciousness.

Not simply are Esperanza's growth and heroism central. The filmgoer's reactions depend, at least in office, on her interpretive vocalization. Contemporary viewers recognize like a page from their ain lives the dramatic conflict between her growing sense of cocky and Ramon's sulky resistance. The flick's feminism was powerful plenty to provoke male unionists ranging from officials in the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, co-producers of the motion-picture show, to the Longshoremen'southward Harry Bridges into complaining to organizer Clint Jencks (the film's Frank Barnes),

"Why did you have to bring in the adult female question? Why couldn't yous take made a directly labor film?"(4)

The struggle against racism, though of equal weight with the flick's other thrusts, is in some ways less dynamic because information technology generates less disharmonize between the protagonists and less suspense as a narrative element. The racism of the Anglo bosses and their agents emerges in rough and obvious means, every bit racism often does. We see it in the designation of Ramon Quintero as "Ray" and "Pancho," the beating and taunting of Ramon in the police motorcar, the statements about Mexican Americans' childlike mentality.

The picture show not only depicts the "evils of racism"—the exact abuse, the vicious bigotry in working and living conditions—it besides exposes racism'due south economic usefulness. Information technology does so by suggesting that racism serves the bosses by dividing the workers and setting them against one another. Finally, it vigorously asserts the value of traditions and history divergent from the dominant Anglo culture. Mexican American traditions and cultural patterns weave like the Spanish language throughout the texture of the film. References to the floricanto—flowers and vocal—add a poetry to the screenplay while evoking the quality of the Latino heritage. The score, by Sol Kaplan, consists of variations on "La Adelita," a fighting song of women in the Mexican Revolution. (five) I of the motion picture's sub-themes concerns the inroads of the dominant Angle culture on the Mexican American. The cowboy music on the radio, the ersatz Spanish music on the jukebox, suggest its dilution. When the deputies take away the radio, they force the people to depict on their own chapters to create culture rather than depend every bit consumers on the prepackaged. "Hither," says Ramon, thrusting the guitar ("a dusty guitar," says the screenplay) at i of his friends, "Allow'south hear some real music for a alter."

As UCLA's Bob Rosen points out, SALT OF THE EARTH lacks a dialectic common in many Third Earth films. That is, the film does not treat the traditions of an ethnic or national group as both source of strength and as relics of the past inimical to progressive struggle. In SALT even the Church appears chivalrous, even though church officials in the real strike warned the women back into their homes lest they sin. Perhaps that dialectic emerges only in films less indebted to Anglos for their concluding shape. Where ethnicity is concerned, self criticism has always seemed more appropriate than criticism. On the whole, though, the film is careful in its portrayal of working form Mexican American life, taking an obvious pleasure in the culture without patronizing information technology. (vi)

The preceding iv paragraphs were qualifications, non judgments. For Table salt OF THE EARTH is a rich and powerful film, and what information technology has to say matters every bit much at present as twenty years ago. Having seen it, we leave the theater with renewed free energy for the struggles in our ain lives.

A Postscript

The twenty-four hour period I finished this paper, I attended a discussion grouping on ideology and the media that brought Stanley Aronowitz and Bob Rosen together. Ironically, given the use I make of their ideas in this essay, both of them questioned the merit of SALT OF THE EARTH as a work of art. Aronowitz, a Hitchcock fan, used Salt as an case of a flick politically "correct" just ideologically heavy handed and formally uninteresting. He wants ambiguity in art, reflecting a complex reality. Rosen faulted the film, as I understand it, for its linear qualities every bit narrative and its failure to apply the photographic camera and the editing room in innovative means. The film, he said, provides no "cerebral space." He preferred films with formal devices enervating critical thought likewise equally immediate emotional involvement. Both found the film melodramatic, sentimental, "Hollywoodish," though Aronowitz added that he had seen it half dozen times, each time with pleasure. Some of their specific objections, particularly Aronowitz'south, sounded like to those Pauline Kael registered in her 1954 essay on the motion picture (in I Lost Information technology at the Movies, Bantam, 1966, pp. 298-311). Their reactions, though, were harder for me to dismiss than her blatantly anti-communist diatribe.

Those who admire the film, equally I practise, can respond to their criticism in two ways:

(one) We tin admit the validity of the criteria—innovativeness, ambiguity, complexity, aesthetic distance—but question their negative awarding to SALT OF THE World.

(2) We can argue that the criteria themselves are as well narrow, that Salt OF THF Earth, though information technology may lack all or some of the criteria in question, possesses other aesthetic values neglected in the discussion and/or values that are non strictly aesthetic merely are nevertheless important.

I would defend the motion picture on both counts while conceding that there is some truth to the criticisms.

Certainly, innovative, interesting camera work and editing style are one measure of a flick's quality. And information technology is true that SALT OF THE Earth breaks no new ground in these areas. But if the photographic camera work and editing are non venturesome, neither are they flawed. That is a considerable feat given the constant harassment during every phase of piece of work on the film from preproduction to distribution, resulting in a lack of money throughout, an inexperienced and understaffed crew and express admission to Hollywood technical facilities during editing. (7) Yet, the filmmakers did their all-time to turn the restrictions to advantage. For example, when insufficient personnel and equipment for a moving photographic camera dictated the use of a stationary one, Biberman decided to shoot scenes from the same bending just at a number of distances. This mode the pace of the pic, with its unprofessional bandage and their slow, halting English, could exist speeded upwardly by rapid cutting. Also,

"considering there were no changed angles, the audience would not have a sensation of abruptness and being yanked virtually."
— Table salt of the Earth, p. 80

Consequently, the filmgoer is aware, not of the camera, but of the people and the state. A film of deliberate social realism, Common salt OF THE Globe uses a combination of shut ups, group scenes and full shots in a way that suggests the relation between the central couple, their customs and their surroundings. The camera work in the terminal sequence, described in more detail above, illustrates this usage. Personally, I find the deliberately unobtrusive camera way advisable to its subject field.

Then there is the business organisation about ambiguity and complexity. Perhaps for this give-and-take we tin can make a distinction between the 2 terms. The contrary of complication is simplicity; of ambiguity, clarity. All accept been used at diverse times as terms of critical praise. Ambiguity suggests to me, William Empson's seven types still, the relativity of value. Information technology seems especially apt in discussing the moral implications of art, the difficulty of resolving problems of good and evil. It is useful every bit a descriptive term; I have my reservations near it equally a criterion. Complexity, if we define information technology every bit richness, depth, resonance and, in mimetic art, some fidelity to the messiness of life, does seem to me an of import value. I am arguing that art can exist complex without being ambiguous. Common salt OF THE EARTH seems to me such a piece of work.

Certainly the film is not ambiguous virtually where it stands, where its sympathies are. And yes, this clarity of conviction does at times make for melodrama, particularly in the polarization of the forces of good and the forces of evil. The bosses and the deputies (less so the sheriff) are cardboard figures, racist backer pigs and their agents, villains less than convincing in their total nastiness. That their counterparts in real life were as nasty, as newspaper accounts betoken, is perhaps no vindication of the film's artful merit—though information technology does answer the charges of critics less sympathetic than Aronowitz and Rosen that these figures were exaggerated for propagandistic purposes. But it is some vindication to indicate out that these figures lie outside the motion-picture show's chief dramatic interests. The struggle that figures most prominently is that of the working-class customs to unify itself. The picture mirrors the complication of that struggle in its construction and central characterizations.

Aronowitz used the term overdetermination to attack the film's structure and ideology. He misused the term, (8) but he knew what he meant: "Over" for him clearly meant "as well much." He found the coexistence of contradictions based on form, race and sex unconvincing and heavy handed. Though historical accuracy in a fictional film is not of itself a validation of merit, nonetheless it is worth remembering that such a juncture in history is what brought the filmmakers to New Mexico in the kickoff place. And unlike Aronowitz, I find the use of these related struggles an important source of dramatic tension. As described in the body of this essay, they do not overlap and confirm one some other in facile ways. Rather, the struggles bump contradictorily against one another, determining the narrative construction of the film.

The characterizations range in complexity, but even the chip parts, except those of the "bad guys," transcend the stereotypical. The fullest portrayals, of form, are those of Ramon and Esperanza. Ramon is not a "pure" working-grade hero. His key decency, passion and compassion exercise not forestall a sullenness, a quickness to acrimony and a defensiveness on the issues of sex and race that one understands without liking in the least. I suspect that male person critics like Aronowitz, who believes with other male leftists that the film fails to stand for working-class interests as assuredly every bit information technology does feminist ones, would as soon delete this dimension of complexity. Certainly Esperanza'southward growth in strength and consciousness, then well portrayed by Rosaura Revueltas, is at the heart of the film.

Indeed, the script's real innovativeness lies in the very selection of a adult female as both protagonist and narrator. Her growth, dull and hard won, brings her up difficult and abrupt against the pervasive sexism of her world, including her husband. She and Ramon are convincing, three-dimensional characters. And the film finds some superb ways to suggest their changing interactions. I is the moment when Esperanza removes the chair from under Ramon's anxiety and brings information technology into the circle for the meeting of the Auxiliary. Another is the scene when, in jail, she passes the children quietly to Ramon, then slowly lifts her head, opens her mouth and for the first time screams with the other women. Perhaps i has to be a adult female to know what an important moment that is.

The language of the picture, both visual and discursive, also achieves a level of complexity. One of the characteristics of both narration and dialogue, for example, is a remarkable density of historical reference. Phrase after phrase evokes whole episodes in these people'southward feel: a history of land grants and land grabs ("claims his grandfather used to ain the country where the mine is at present" ), of hole-and-corner struggles to build a matrimony, of painful discrimination and exploitation, of resistance and pride. A familiarity with that history and with the culture of the people of New Mexico increases one's appreciation for the authenticity of the film and makes one able to recognize its richness—a richness of innuendo, rather than of irony or symbol.

Non that the film lacks a multivalent iconography. The rifle, as described higher up, is 1 circuitous icon; the radio is some other. The radio provides the housebound Esperanza with her main source of pleasure. It also functions as a measure of the workers' exploitation under the installment plan and the Mexican American's cultural oppression under the onslaught of Anglo products. It appears at critical junctures in the narrative. In the opening scenes Esperanza clings to it and Ramon attacks it. Afterward, when the deputies arrive to repossess it, he shows his love by his readiness to fight over it, and she shows her new political astuteness by holding him fiercely back.

Finally, Salt OF THE Earth does possess some value not mentioned by Aronowitz and Rosen in their admittedly unsystematic discussion of criteria: The film has a remarkable unity and economy, in which no gesture or discussion or scene is wasted. Information technology has a content that matters, by which I do not mean an ideologically correct "line" but rather a believable and accurate portrayal of a customs in struggle and transition. And not least, the film has the power to motion us deeply.

This last quality perhaps confirms Rosen's argument that SALT OF THE EARTH offers no "cognitive space." Certainly the aesthetic of the filmmakers lay at the other end of the continuum from the illusion-breaking Brechtian style. Theirs was a deliberately melancholia art. And information technology is true that Table salt OF THE EARTH does non always avoid sentimentality. But if it is occasionally sentimental, it is never, I think, quack. There, is nothing vulgar or self-indulgent in its appeal to our emotions. And if it tin can still motion us on the 6th viewing, its appeal must transcend the manipulative. Sentimentality alone would surely wear thin after a 3rd or fourth exposure. Must we assume that appeals to the heart preclude appeals to intelligence and good taste?

Salt OF THE EARTH does something else as well. Information technology inspires belief in the possibility of genuine social change. It encourages us to human activity on that belief. Seeing information technology has made a difference in more than than one life; my own was 1 of them.

Both Aronowitz and Rosen find SALT OF THE EARTH an "engaging" film; they only practice not regard information technology every bit good art. I disagree in this instance. I think it is an of import film, and I think it is a skilful one. But I share their insistence that the left requires a civilisation rigorous in its artistic and critical standards, capable of self criticism, and imaginative and supportive in its forms. This is a demand that no one on the left concerned about the juncture between civilisation and class struggle tin afford to ignore.

Notes

1. I practice not desire to dwell here on the making and subsequent repression of Common salt OF THE EARTH. Much of that story is told in Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film, by Herbert Biberman (Boston: Buoy, 1965). 1 am working now on an afterword to a paperback reprint of the screenplay, presently to be published by the Feminist Printing. Information technology will discuss the flick'south historic context and significance at some length. Most readers will be familiar with the flick's background, but for those who aren't, here is a summary: The moving-picture show was based on an actual strike at Empire Zinc, a subsidiary of New Jersey zinc, lasting from Oct 17, 1950, until January 25, 1952. The film was the production of an unusual collaboration between blacklisted Hollywood people and the families of a militant local of the International Spousal relationship of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Near of its major roles were played by people in the mining community. Efforts to complete and distribute the picture were hampered by local redbaiting and vigilantism, the displacement of the Mexican extra who played Esperanza, Congressional pressure and opposition from the studies and the conservative IATSE.

2. Imitation Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), pp. 333-4.

3. I am indebted to Bob Rosen and some of his students in the UCLA Department of Theater Arts for the concept of "conflict and convergence" though not for its specific awarding in this case, and for many of the ideas in the post-obit discussion, particularly concerning the film'south iconography.

iv. Interview with Clint Jencks, Summer 1975. He was capturing the tenor of their remarks, non quoting them straight.

5. Some of the film'due south to the lowest degree convincing moments occur when matrimony songs drawn from Anglo working-form culture and obviously performed by Anglo singers burst along from the soundtrack—ostensibly the women on the back of the truck and on the picket line giving a rousing rendition of "We Shall Not Be Moved." If we compare that moment to the mañanita scene, when the community gathers to serenade Esperanza on her Saint'southward Solar day, we recognize the deviation betwixt authenticity and superimposition.

half dozen. The genesis of Table salt OF THE EARTH was in many ways a collective effort. Michael Wilson wrote the script in abiding consultation with the mining customs, and a production lath of four members each from the miners, the Ladies' Auxiliary and Hollywood coordinated production. Just that is an essay in its own correct.

vii. During the legal struggles over the cold-shoulder of SALT OF THE EARTH Paul Jarrico, its producer, prepared a 40-page chronology detailing the specifics of the harassment. It brings domicile vividly the staggering thoroughness and brutality of the blacklist.

8. The term overdetermination was borrowed from Freud by French Marxist Louis Althusser, who uses it not judgmentally but descriptively to describe how various contradictions in society, including the "final" contradiction between labor and capital, sometimes reinforce, sometimes impede, one some other's revolutionary potential. In that sense, not the judgmental i, the term does indeed draw the historical moment on which SALT OF THE EARTH is based—but so, Althusser argues that such overdetermination is always present.

Copyright 1976, Debby Rosenfelt

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