Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito, 2020) (Patreon)

In 2007, filmmaker and scholar John Gianvito made Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a feature documentary / landscape study that followed a trail of forgotten historical markers and gravesites, tracing a silent testimonial network that told of an often-forgotten, seldom spoken-of leftist foundation of the United States. Now, in 2020 when we arguably need it the most, Gianvito offers a quasi-sequel to that film, in the form of a political biography of one of America's most revered, but perhaps least understood intellectuals.

This is the story of Helen Keller, whose first autobiography, Story of My Life, has for years been required reading in grade schools around the world. She is primarily known as a pioneer in the field of disability rights. Born blind and deaf, she defied expectation by learning to read, write, and speak, with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. However, her story has been sentimentalized as a tale of individual triumph and determination, an early liberal-humanist example of "no child left behind." Gianvito's film refutes the image of Keller as the perpetual little girl learning to speak, and demands that we recognize the woman whose actual place in 20th century history is a bit more inconvenient.

In her twenties, during the course of her philosophical and sociological studies, Keller became a dedicated socialist, a position from which she never swerved her entire life. Influenced by direct study of the works of Marx and Bakunin, she came to see that virtually all of her political commitments -- women's suffrage, racial justice, workers' rights, the defense of children, the antiwar movement, as well as the rights of the disabled -- could only be realized on the precondition that capitalism be replaced with an industrial workers' state. While Keller started out as a socialist aligned with trade unions and organized party politics in the U.S., she eventually abandoned those avenues as too reformist, instead joining the I.W.W. (the Wobblies), and demanding a radical reconfiguration of society.

Gianvito depicts Keller's point of view in a number of compelling ways. The film must grapple with the fact, stated early in the narration, that despite Keller's hundreds of well-attended public lectures and events, no film documentation exists of them, and few recordings of her speech survive. So there is a cyclical organization to Her Socialist Smile, whereby a broad outline of Keller's life and work is provided in voiceover (read by poet-activist Carolyn Forché), and the majority of Keller's own words are presented in silence, as blocks of white text on a black screen. This makes Her Socialist Smile something of a "reading film," a textual object that separates rather than harmonizes the usual components of the cinema.

In contrast, Gianvito frequently punctuates the film with colorful images from nature -- flowers, foliage, snow-covered landscapes, and the like. This material not only connects the Keller film with Profit Motive, but serves to heighten the viewer's experience of the visual -- one of the senses that Keller did not have at her disposal -- by withholding its contents and then providing them, in stark isolation, as entities worthy of their own contemplation.

And, as an additional strand of material, Gianvito frequently returns us to an empty theater, a gloriously restored WPA hall of the early part of the previous century, its murals and broad proscenium suggesting the great crowds Keller addressed in the prime of her public career. During these sequences, Gianvito uses superimposed questions and answers to give as a taste of Keller's appearances as a public intellectual, and she comes off as puckish, occasionally coquettish, razor sharp in her dialectics, and never less than sincere.

By any reckoning, Her Socialist Smile is a beautifully executed portrait of a major figure in American intellectual history, someone whose rougher edges have been sanded away, both by the general homogenizing tendencies of time, and the inherent sexism, ableism, and anti-leftism that defines the dominant discourse in this country. Any cause for a reconsideration of Helen Keller (especially her monumental 1913 essay collection Out of the Dark) is cause for celebration. But need it be said? We find ourselves at a decisive kairotic moment in American cultural and political life. There are certain historical truths that cannot be ceded to the fascists who have crawled out of the rat holes of late. They want us to believe that Martin Luther King was a Republican, not a socialist; that Andrew Jackson is a more enduring symbol of American greatness than Harriet Tubman; and that Helen Keller was only that little girl at the well who discovered water, spoke the word, and faded back into demure silence. 

As Her Socialist Smile shows, we've been fighting Fox News and its ilk for a long time. And if Keller's example can offer lessons for the present day, one of them might be this: it's possible that being shielded from the society of the spectacle may protect one's mental faculties. After all, almost every piece of information that Keller absorbed was taken in by choice. This is in no way to fetishize Keller's difference in abilities, but to postulate them as a legitimate basis for an epistemological position less susceptible to ideology.