Her Socialist Smile

I previously knew Helen Keller mainly as the deaf-blind girl in the powerful biopic The Miracle Worker who, thanks to her teacher Anne Sullivan, learned to communicate with the world around her and graduated from Harvard. The fascinating documentary Her Socialist Smile also presents her as a suffragette, pacifist and radical socialist (or anarchist to some) who studied Marx and Bakunin and spent her entire life fighting for class revolution and the rights of the disabled, women, children and racial minorities... and she was very sharp. Whenever she encountered injustice, she did not hesitate to respond to it with a public speech, a newspaper article, a book or an open letter (addressed directly to the president, for example) in which she could describe, with admirable precision, the essence of the given problem, whether it was working conditions, women’s right to vote or the impact of socio-political crises on the most vulnerable social groups. ___ This minimalist essay is not delivered chronologically, which is practically the only way in which it is reminiscent of ordinary portraits of celebrities. One level comprises sensuous shots of living nature accompanied by commentary by poet and activist Carolyn Forché, which puts the facts of Keller’s life in context. These passages are complemented by numerous transcriptions of words that Keller said or wrote. No sound, just a long paragraph of text on a black background. Reading instead of listening or watching. There is an occasional twist and momentary change of narrator, or instead of slugs and treetops, we see an excerpt from Chomsky’s lecture on Leninism, or a rock version of “Bandiera Rossa” suddenly starts to play alongside the text. Therefore, it is not enough to adjust to one type of “reading”, as we momentarily use other senses, another part of the brain. Images, sounds and the written word are for the most part independent of each other; through its form, the film brings us closer to Keller’s way of perceiving the world, as she was unable to perceive everything at once. John Gianvito, who incidentally is a professor of visual arts and media, thus puts forth not only a revision of the documentary portrait format, but also a revision of how we receive and process information. Through the media, we are ordinarily overwhelmed by everything thrown at us simultaneously – images, sounds and text – without the option of being selective. Here we have to pay special attention to every element of the film and form connections between them ourselves. Here Socialist Smile is thus, in filmmaking terms, a daring work that places demands on one’s attention while also being a very stimulating reminder of a major figure in American cultural and political life whose many ideas are still relevant today. 85% (04/10/2021)