A brief note on the film “Very Gentle Work”

Shortly before his death in 2022, Mike Davis published an essay in the New Left Review titled “Thanatos Triumphant” about the dire state of climate politics. He concludes with the following enjoinder:

Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.

Two assassins who failed—and one who did not. 

The story of Sholem Schwarzbard may resonate with particular intensity for younger Jews who are interested in histories of the militant Jewish left: those people, organizations, and movements that made a claim to a Jewish future at odds with the one that, in the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, came to pass. Today, a whole generation looks beyond the Democrats, Israel, and AIPAC and returns to the stories of Yiddishland, doikayt, the Bund, and Marek Edelman. An old orientation—communist, diasporist, and anti-Zionist—resurfaces at the same moment when states and institutions that claim to speak and act on our behalf desecrate the memories of our ancestors through a program of genocide and apartheid.

The film Very Gentle Work begins from the obligation “to pay homage at the hero grave” of Sholem Schwarzbard, but traces that revolutionary lineage from the 1920s, through the New Left bombings of the 1970s, and concludes in the present moment. Within the film, “psychogeographic” connections are given prominence as the unseen narrator travels around the city of New York visiting the sites of half-forgotten bombings by groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN).

The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska once wrote: “the most ephemeral of moments possesses an illustrious past.” What moment is more ephemeral than an explosion? What past more illustrious than that of struggle? Very Gentle Work proposes that the attacks it memorializes constitute a tradition.

The militants described in Morris’s “tour” were sometimes Jewish, sometimes not. But in their actions they all carried their particularist traditions into the universalism of struggle. They shout from the streets that it is through our covenant with each other—our comrades—that we will free ourselves and, in the same breath, the world.

This claim to freedom and tradition is also expressed in the film’s visual style.

In an essay from 1956, Jean-Luc Godard, paraphrasing Marx, argued that film editing works by “destroying the notion of space in favor of that of time.” In Very Gentle Work the reverse occurs—space overcomes time. In making contact with sites of struggle, and paying homage to our hero dead, we can reach back through time and renew dormant traditions, assess what is salvagable and what we must fashion anew.  While watching this film, look hard at what is and you will see both what was and what could be.

Nate Lavey

March 2024