Director: John Gianvito
Producer: John Gianvito
Director of Photography: John Gianvito
Editor: John Gianvito
Sound Designer: John Gianvito
Music: Roberto Casan, Paul Robeson, Infernal Noise Brigade, Ani DiFranco, Utah Phillips

John Gianvito chronicles America's progressive political tradition in completely original fashion. Using Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States as a point of departure, he traverses the US, filming gravesites, tombstones, monuments, and signposts that commemorate Native American uprisings, slave rebellions, abolitionists, feminists, labor leaders, striking workers, and other activists. Gianvito organizes his film as a chronological narrative of the ongoing struggle for social justice from the 17th century to the present day. His cinematic excavation of these long-forgotten sites adroitly brings to the fore America's rich history of social protest, especially relevant given the conservative times in which we live. Every shot of Profit motive, which the National Society of Film Critics named the best experimental film of 2007, is beautifully composed. Gianvito frames the memory of bygone human struggles against the majesty of nature: Stone and metal remnants lie beneath bending tree branches and leaves fluttering in the breeze. Such stately visual compositions evoke on another level the human dramas played out beneath the immutable Monument Valley landscapes of John Ford's Westerns. The gentle pace of the film, underscored by ambient sounds, conveys an elegiac, restrained quality. Gianvito contrasts this style with his own hand-drawn animation of frenzied stock exchange transactions and gold mines, setting capitalism against the struggle for social justice. At the climax of the film, the rapid-fire montage sequence of a contemporary protest elicits a call to action of the citizenry not unlike the spirit of Eisenstein's film Potemkin.

--Jon Gartenberg

John Gianvito (b. Staten Island) earned a BFA in film and video from the California Institute of the Arts and a MS in visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served for five years as the film programmer for the Harvard Film Archive and is currently film curator for the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. In 2001, he was made a chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters. Gianvito is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. His writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, CinemaScope, Undercurrent, International Documentary, and elsewhere. He is the editor of the book, Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews.

Beginning in summer 2004 and continuing on and off through fall 2006, I began driving around the United States in search of traces of America's progressive past. Ultimately the journey became a way of not only furthering my education regarding this history, but a way of making this past tangible and, perhaps ironically (since much of the time was spent in graveyards), alive. In seeking to 'write' a poem out of these memorial sites, in registering them on film, I found myself reminded of Faulkner's famous quote that ‘The past is never dead; it’s not even past.’ For me it felt at times less like documentation than a kind of sensitometry. Everywhere one looks the evidence abounds of the successful and the failed consequences of this trajectory of struggle. We are, in fact, surrounded by the dead. And they have things to tell us.

In his recent essay, ‘If History is to be Creative,’ renowned historian and activist Howard Zinn observes that ‘America's future is linked to how we understand the past. For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act.’ As the mystic mainspring for the project, Howard Zinn's writings, most particularly his landmark book, A People's History of the United States, serve to remind us of the many voices omitted and silenced within traditional textbooks. In resurrecting stories of the struggles and significant contributions of America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers, Zinn's emphasis is not merely in recounting the details of the past, but consistently, Zinn focuses our understanding upon what that past means to our present, and how this knowledge, so much of it long kept from view, can be used to guide us forward. Without wanting to make a kind of CliffsNotes version of Howard Zinn's writing, my impulses were, I felt, contiguous with those of Zinn's own scholarly intentions—to fashion a poem out of some of the remnants of America's past in hopes that the assembling of this historical mosaic would have things to tell us about our present, and perhaps to serve as a moral compass forward.

On the practical front, the film was the fruit of thousands of miles of driving during three summers with, in some instances, return trips undertaken in hopes of better photographing a particular location. Even more hours were spent doing the detective work to locate the desired burial sites and markers. While Findagrave.com and Mapquest were often a help, this would sometimes only lead me to the cemetery but not the location, resulting in countless hours of wandering and scouring inscriptions. In other cases, more investigatory efforts were required. Emails, phone calls, and two separate trips to a graveyard in Philadelphia resulted in pulling out handwritten records and, with the help of kind groundskeepers, pacing out the unmarked site of Uriah Stephens' grave. Similar scouting through yellowed records, led to identifying the burial site of early abolitionists and women's rights activists Sarah and Angelina Grimké in a little-visited corner of a cemetery in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. While I had found the location, there appeared to be no markers until I discovered Sarah Grimké's name and dates hand-etched and eroding upon the reverse side of her brother-in-law, Theodore Weld's headstone (while curiously his wife Angelina's name is not to be found). 

The list of folks I attempted to track down without luck is nearly as long as those I located, individuals who were either cremated, their ashes scattered, or whose families kept their resting place private, or whose whereabouts are simply unknown or vanished. There were also those who contributed mightily to the enriching of this nation and whose remains are buried elsewhere (W.E.B. Du Bois in Ghana, Marcus Garvey in Jamaica, Benjamin Tucker in Monaco, Bill Haywood in Moscow, etc.) and, of course, those whose names and deeds, equally deserved of our gratitude and remembrance, were never penned and passed down or, if recorded, have since drifted from memory. 

Finally, Profit motive and the whispering wind was from the first seed of an idea intended less as a work of recollection and mourning than as a spur to thought and to action. It is, in its very tiny and most humble way, part of my contribution to the struggle.