Now! (1965)

Using morgue photos, newsreel footage, and an amazing (if slightly over-arranged) recording by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off 'Now!', one of the most powerful bursts of propaganda rendered in the 1960s. Not intended as a work of great subtlety, Alvarez wields other people's images with perhaps more artistry than those who created them, and builds a remarkable piece of rhetorical cinema in the process. It's target -- the then-current racial conflagration in the United States -- is an easy one. But it is perhaps this very fact that most fuels the scorn and rage in the marrow of this film. If there was any room for nuance, he might have gone a little easier.

'Now!' is strident, yes; but breathtaking.

Tom Sutpen

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Santiago
• Alvarez
• Cuban
• Cinema

[dheschete]

I find it funny that Communist propaganda would choose a Jewish tune. Were they trying to prove my grandmother right?

[Tasutpen]

Not knowing what your grandmother predicted, I can't say if it was fulfilled or not, but the song Alvarez chose to accompany these images was recorded two years earlier and otherwise has no connection to this film. My guess is the lyrics . . . written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; both Jewish, neither Communist (in case that matters) . . . represented the primary intent of the piece; the melody was incidental.

By the way, Santiago Alvarez was a Socialist, not a Communist.

[dheschete]

My grandmother was dreadfully anti-Semitic and anti-Communist. She always maintained that Jews and Communism/Socialism were inextricably tied. The song that Lena is singing in that cut-up is based on "Hava Nagila," a Jewish folk song. The melody, my grandmother would insist, is far from incidental.

[Tasutpen]

I'm pretty sure she'd be wrong on that. I mean, it's hard to impute anti-semitism to a song when the man who wrote the melody for the introductory bit (Jule Styne) and both lyricists were Jewish. If anything having those lyrics set to 'Hava Nagilah' had more to do with Black/Jewish solidarity in the Civil Rights movement at the time the song was recorded (1963). Alvarez no doubt used it because . . . there just weren't a whole lot of other songs like it he could use.

[Tasutpen]

Los autores de las líricas son Betty Comden y verde de Adolph Green

[Tasutpen]

¿Quién canta la segunda canción? Hay solamente una canción en esta película y es cantada por Lena Horne

[hebneh]

This short film gives a hint of some of the complicated, violent, significant changes which kept coming at us in the 1960s.

[carlah2020]

Excelent! By cinema critics is the foyndation for the modern videoclip, even it is a documental exposing the fight for civil rights for black people in the USA

[fortunateartistcV]

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[less01]

@yosoyelvecino la diferencia es que en EUA es posibel mostrar este y cualquier documental sea progaandistico o no y es permitido la protesta de todo tipo me gustaria saber si otros regimenes resistirian un filme asi de agrio!..???

[yosoyelvecino]

3:55 fiel muestra de la hipocresía norteamericana.

[zeriveg]

great example of montage cinema.. soviet influences here!

[zeriveg]

ouch chrisrox21... lol

[ZzTheTruthzZ]

different