GIMME.
Merely anti-capitalist will do too, in a pinch.
And tv shows.
Sorry to Bother You was made by a commie and has commie themes.
Snowpiercer (the movie) is pretty blatant.
Bunch of Soviet films, of course.
The Marx & Engels anime lol
Sorry to Bother You was made by a commie
"A" commie
:boots-riley:
I saw Snowpiercer as a lib and walked out of the theater saying "it's not that simple."
They live is the ultimate “anyone reads their ideology into it” kind of movie. I’m sure fascists think it’s about how Jews control the world or whatever
Quite frankly, any kind of movie that relies on secret rulers and a hidden power is more fash than leftist, not that that necessarily says anything about John Carpenter directly of course.
If they bail on the movie early that’s certainly true, but the ultimate goal of the aliens is to extract all of earth’s resources and abandon us to die. Pretty clear critique of capitalism.
A Bug’s Life and Chicken Run are unironically great Marxist films.
Guillermo del Toro's films are often very explicitly anti-fascist & with leftist heroes, especially Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone both of which take place around the Spanish Civil War.
Just finished thanks to this thread. Probably too subtle for anyone not already leaning far left. Heck of a watch though. Thanks for the rec.
Have you watched any Costa-Gavras? He's a comrade who made a ton of great left flicks. Z (1969) is his most famous, about the Greek military coup in the 60s, though State of Siege (1972) is my personal favourite, about the Tupamaros abducting and killing Dan Mitrione in Uruguay.
For something more contemporary, Édgar Ramírez plays Carlos the Jackal in Carlos (2010), a Marxist-Leninist PFLP terrorist. I highly recommend the 5-hour version.
is Carlos (2010) actually sympathetic? surprises me a little since it's a French-German production and they have him in jail
Yeah I mean Assayas isn't an arm of the French state. If you want to know if he has any left cred he also made The Wasp Network (2020) about the Cuban spies that infiltrated gusano terrorists. He also talked shit about The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) (about the Red Army Faction) because the film doesn't take a stance on whether the state killed them or not.
Anyways he is played pretty heroically honestly, played by a very sexy actor, gets sexy women, gets all the badass lines. However we should remember he isn't entirely sympathetic as he did kill and maim a lot of French workers to try to force the state to release his wife from prison.
Anyways deliberating whether someone is good or not as anti-dialectic, but the film definitely doesn't make him the villain.
thanks for such a detailed response, I'm definitely going to check it out even if it is five and half hours!
I think there's a European version that cuts it into three movies, the first is everything pre-OPEC, the second one is just the OPEC raid, the third is everything after. I'd suggest just watching the first two rather than watching a shorter cut of the whole thing. The third is good too and really gives context to the whole thing, as you see the way the state responds to prevent/minimize the efficacy of terrorism.
After I finally watched Andor, I told my lib friend—who had been telling me to watch it—that it was the most Marxist show I had ever seen. He was shocked into silence.
Thanks. I am curious about the 2019 one but it doesn't seem leftist.
I think you can immediately feel if a movie that has satire of revolutionary leftism was written by someone who's actually interacted with anyone from there, or not.
And Network definitely feels like the writer had been talking to some American maoist groups and shit like that.
Sutjeska if you're in the mood for :tito-laugh: :pit:
The Battle of Algiers if you're in the mood for :sankara-shining: :france-cool:
Salt of the Earth (1954). A Pro-union film made during the McCarthy Era.
Walker 1987 is probably the last actual left wing movie that got made by a major studio in Hollywood. It basically ended the directors career.
It's about early colonisation in Central America and starts off as a traditional American pro colonisation movie and then descends into madness, the timeline randomly breaking with anachronistic objects like coke bottles and cans (central Americas new coloniser - see Coke anti union death squads in Colombia), or cars and helicopters. The credits roll real footage of Americans committing war crimes. I wont lie, it's kind of a slog at points, but still quite cool. Soundtrack by Joe Strummer of The Clash too.
Otherwise, for another wacky one - Accidental Death Of An Anarchist - originally by playwright Dario Fo about Italian fascists, it got adapted for British TV with seemingly zero supervision. The result is sort of a very blatant left wing monty python. You might have to stick with it a little bit - I think the first 10 minutes aren't as strong as the rest of it. The best part: https://youtu.be/kllonwGMTfw It's free on YouTube.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Cool experiment in telling a story exclusively through editing, and the story they tell is about the cities of the Soviet Union being cool, modern, and dope. And also the kinds of good times people could be having.
This version has a modern electronic based soundtrack which fits perfectly with the way ahead of its time editing, basically feels like a hour long music video.
Edit: Also a version with an orchestral soundtrack that I saw many people recommend, I havent watched myself yet cause I find the electronic one to fit so well anyways.
I hadn't heard that electronic score, that's wild. I just watched Kino-Eye and Enthusaism: Symphony of the Donbass this week, both were cool but I wonder how they'd compare if they had similar scores?
The entirety of the Mosfilm catalogue which is free on their youtube channel
Even Bondarchuk's War and Peace, which is basically about a bunch of Russian aristocrats, has a pretty noticeable leftwing slant. It's definitely anti-war and might be considered pro-peasant. The character of Napoleon is also an obvious stand-in for Hitler and possibly for the USA generally; the racist and sexist carousing which takes place in occupied Moscow could be considered a warning for what might happen (and what indeed did happen) if the USA ever defeated the USSR. But one invading French soldier gets left behind when Napoleon flees to France, and he then becomes friends with the Russians. One of the main characters (Bezukhov) is supposed to become a Decembrist after the story ends, and maybe he could be considered a proto-communist, even if he is an extremely wealthy aristocrat. The aristocrats themselves are shown fighting pretty childishly over the inheritance of Bezukhov's father virtually the instant he dies.
Napoleon is also an obvious stand-in for Hitler
IMO not fair. Napoleon freed Europe from feudalism and theocracy. It wasn't perfect but much better than what came before and after.
Of course, I meant this is how he's depicted in the movie, since I think Russians generally uh have a less than positive view of good ole boney.
