Even more, creative response smashes the notion that the ideologies dominating our lives are natural. “Every ideology in history has always tried to disguise the fact that it’s an ideology by saying its doctrine is natural,” novelist and film participant Hari Kunzru tells me. “It’s about mechanisms that are really, really embedded but don’t necessarily feel coercive. This is a great con trick.” One of the strengths of creative response is that it is a way for us to identify a different way of understanding the world. It opens up a consciousness that can conceive and wrestle with what type of a society we want to live in. What else do artists and writers and musicians do except dream about ways of doing something anew? “If you look at history, behaved people change nothing,” playwright and film participant Eve Ensler tells me. “And I believe in misbehaving.” Ensler echoes German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. “Temptation to behave is terrible,” Brecht explained. “All art forms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.” With this as the foundation of awareness, artists perform a valuable function—coming in and having some kind of effect, opening up spaces of possibility. These fissures led to Ensler’s groundbreaking feminist production The Vagina Monologues, which helped inspire mainstream discussion of female sexuality and sexual violence, just as they allowed Brecht’s antiwar epic Mother Courage and Her Children to take on fascism more than a half century earlier.
Currently, even though spectacle and unreality control our politics and culture, there are people making art that will empower us to want to do better. Their art recognizes that “ethics and aesthetics are one,” as philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Otto Weininger believed. One is lost and useless without the other. By obliterating the restrictions imposed on them by a system that discourages collaboration and cooperation among perceived disconnected mediums, creative response makes clear that society and civilization operate through the birth of new relationships based on a shared worldview rooted in our ranging curiosity and deep-seated sensitivity. History is overflowing with models of inimitable creative response alliances. Author Marcel Proust and photographer Eugène Atget shared a fervent enthusiasm to record everything happening around them. This mutual creative worldview brought them together by linking the written word with the visual image. Italian photographer Tina Modotti, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and Mexican muralist Diego Rivera worked side by side presenting a timeless visual rendering of the Mexican peasant struggle in the early twentieth century. Modotti also worked with photography modernizer Alfred Stieglitz who also collaborated with artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee created a lasting portrait of an invisible stratum of America besieged by the Great Depression in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Musician Billy Bragg sums up the outlook supporting creative response: “I know in my heart I have the potential to offer someone that different perspective. To send someone away feeling as if they’re not alone.” This spirit of solidarity expands the reach of creative response, allowing it to spread out to every corner of the world. “The great thing about art of any kind is that it finds its way into those unlikely places,” novelist Hari Kunzru tells me. “Some kid gets hold of it in another country, in a context which we could never have predicted, and a lightbulb appears above that kid’s head.”
I was that kid stumbling across “art of any kind” when I read Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Written in 1958, the book is a powerful modern allegory of the downfall of a proud man serving as a stand-in for the failure of an entire society. Borrowing the title from William Butler Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming,” Achebe’s sensitive touch in rendering the struggles of the Okonkwo and the Igbo people showed me how the novel’s themes—loneliness, despair, fear, change, hope—were collective issues. Like John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Goethe’s Faust, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, or the book that started it all for me—Cervantes’s Don Quixote—each work linked the emotional and the intellectual, allowing me to push out words that otherwise remained stuck in my throat. The words these writers chose reflected the tragic past of an unknown time and place but also expressed the uncertain, shifting historical moment the world was moving through. The same year Achebe’s masterwork was published, photographer Robert Frank published The Americans. Taken at a distance, the visual images presented every vein of American society, offering a nuanced, unadorned portrait of the era. “Black and white are the colors of photography,” Frank explained. “To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”
When Patrice Lumumba traveled to Belgium in January 1960 to meet with Belgian leaders at the Round Table Conference, he did something very unusual. He brought with him the musician Joseph Kabaselle and his orchestra. Lumumba at the time was leading the independence movement that eventually would end Belgium’s 150-year rule over the Congo. His political party had scored a huge victory in the recent elections, recording 90 percent of the vote. This landed Lumumba in jail. Kabaselle placed his music in the center of the struggle for independence, composing “Le Grand Kalle.” The song quickly became the anthem of the Congolese independence movement, helping to rally the country behind Lumumba, forcing the Belgians to free him from prison, and allowing him to participate in the Round Table Conference. Kabaselle’s song triggered an enormous movement of gifted African musicians who similarly mobilized people through their art: Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, Senegal’s Salif Keita, Zimbabwe’s Thomas Mapfumo, and Wassoulou’s Oumou Sangaré.
Fela Kuti broke free with Afrobeat, which blends rock, funk, and jazz with traditional Yoruba music, highlife, and chanted vocals all held tightly together with percussion and unique vocalization. “Afrobeat music was informed by Fela’s experience as a global citizen,” musician and film participant Martin Perna of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra tells me. “Coming in contact with other people feeling like the world needs to go in this direction.” Stuart Bogie of Antibalas elaborates further: “They say, ‘You play Fela music? That’s Nigerian music. You’re Americans.’ And one of the things that I found is that his music serves us and heals us. We play it because it’s useful and critical, and it’s not enough to just put on the record and be like, ‘Oh, gee, what was it like in 1976?’ No. We want to experience this. We want to embody it. We want to put together the chemical combinations of these instruments, and that’s the justification, it’s because the music is the medicine.”
Stuart Bogie and Martin Perna of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
At the same time, the new wave film movement was sweeping through France and out toward the sea. Often cited as a strong influence on the movement, filmmaker Alain Resnais embraced anarchic narrative devices in rendering stories of a vague past and an angst-ridden contemporary world, as evinced by his Last Year in Marienbad. His award-winning 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour and later La guerre est finie (The War Is Over) underscore his tenet that “the present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.”
The movement came alive for me when I saw François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Truffaut’s film flipped the archetypal coming-of-age story by presenting a visually startling yet richly told story of an adolescent boy’s erratic perceptions and diminishing expectations as he moves to adulthood. The film gave me a clearer idea of where I could place myself psychologically and physically in the world, showing me that we don’t really “come of age” but are always chasing “the age” or historical moment we are living in, trying desperately to grab hold of it with both hands. Yet it always remains elusive, hard to see and uncover. It was a companion piece to Vittoria de Sica’s neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief. I could see the two halves of myself in each of the film’s young main characters: Antoine in the former film and the boy Bruno in the latter. Antoine struggles with the transition to adulthood, fac
ing the grim truth that reality offered much less than his dreams did about how to find contentment in this world. Young Bruno watches his father desperately trying to stand erect, to find a shred of self-respect in order to take care of his family. It’s a search for fundamental human dignity denied by a broken societal structure that says “it’s your fault that you’re poor.” The film shatters the illusion that the world is set up for everyone to share equally in its pleasures and possibilities.
The father of new wave, Andre Bazin, explained that “the cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.” Other filmmakers of the movement—Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy—presented an archetype of creative response by making collaboration central to their work. Godard’s contribution in Breathless, for example, with his “false matching shots,” the use of jump cut editing and no artificial lighting, rivaled Gregg Toland’s use of deep focus in of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Their influence, particularly with its emphasis on collaboration, continues to shape creative response cinema today, most notably by the Mexican film trio Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. “It’s not casual or a coincidence us sharing our work and ideas because our work is about communication and challenging the dominant ideologies,” Cuarón says. “We’re brutally honest us with each other but we’re also support groups for each other while we’re shooting because we suffer so much during the process.”
Aspiring young filmmakers in the early 1960s were inspired by the movement’s declaration that “if you wish to transform reality you must first film it.” Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist) and Gilo Pontecorvo (Battle of Algiers), Greece’s Costa Gavras, America’s John Cassavetes (Shadows), Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène (Mandabi), and Poland’s Andrzej Wajda (Gates to Paradise) present a mix of authenticity and dream realism transposing old stories—love, war, poverty, violence, friendship—in ways that stirred emerging generations turned off by the musty and artificial representations of the world presented by conventional cinema. Old masters were renewed, as Luis Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up) continued their relentless cinematic challenge of making audiences think, each testing the boundaries of cinema and the perception (and tolerance) of the viewer. And just as Montaigne created a new literary form with the essay, filmmakers like Chris Marker with his photographic futuristic essay La Jetée, and Emile de Antonio’s unrelenting visual assault on the Vietnam War, In the Year of the Pig, were erasing the confines of documentary filmmaking and creating a new type of hybrid narrative blending photography, film, literature, animation, and anything else they could throw into the creative response cauldron. They brought forward to the cinema surrealist artist Magritte’s The Human Condition, testing observers’ restricted impressions of the world around them.
The artists engaged in creative response forecasted the underground eruption of 1968 as cities around the world were split apart by protest and riots. Godard was at the center in two respects. First, when protesting the government removal of Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque, Godard was cracked in the head, bloodied by the police. “If they attacked Godard without worry or consequence in front of the eyes of the world, we knew that something was desperately wrong in society,” French student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit explained. Second, with his seminal works Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, and Masculin Féminin, with their compelling narrative. In many ways, however, the narrative is secondary to how Godard made the films, representing a sweeping departure from filmmaking. If Godard ever acknowledged rules, it was to show that they could not speak to the issues shaping the world. “Godard was always rebelling against something, even his own ideas,” Breathless cinematographer Raoul Coutard explained. “He wanted to show it was possible to make films a different way.” With fellow filmmaker Truffaut supplying the story and Claude Chabrol on board as technical adviser, Godard sketched out the scenes in the morning and then shot them during the day. It was on the fly, DIY filmmaking, shot on location with no lighting and mismatched sound, not in a sterile studio soundstage. The actors roamed the streets of Paris with nonactors moving in and out of frame behind them continually. “Jean-Luc would say the lines out loud and then the actors would repeat them,” Coutard said. Shooting with photographic film, which has greater sensitivity to light, allowed Godard to shoot at night with little reliance on cumbersome equipment and time-consuming setups. “Breathless set certain people free who wanted to make films differently,” Coutard explained. “I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy,” Jean Seberg’s character Patricia Franchini says in the film. Godard called it filmmaking as social criticism, tapping into the growing sense of confusion and uncertainty gripping the culture.
At the same time, we in America saw the rise of a new kind of writer—Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Jack Newfield, Harlan Ellison, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker—presenting reality and political consciousness with an intensely intimate style of storytelling. “B.B. King and Ben E. King were warm-up acts for Martin Luther King. Rock ’n’ roll didn’t lead to delinquency: it led to democracy,” Jack Newfield wrote. Musically, the MC5 provided an elaborate soundtrack that helped us find the correct way of reading this reality. “The music itself, in the sound, in the way I played the guitar, was parallel with the political frustration and the outrage of what I experienced in my life in the streets of America,” MC5 founder and guitarist Wayne Kramer tells me. “And what I did in my music in the MC5 was part of this larger thing that was happening all around the world. I realized if I tell the truth in the song, there’s a chance that you will feel the same way I do and then we meet in the song.”
From the streets of America to the soccer fields of Europe, Johan Cruyff, a lanky, long-haired Dutch soccer player dubbed “Pythagoras in boots,” was ushering in his own era of creative response on the field. Leading the play like a first chair musician and not a conductor in an orchestral performance, Cruyff saw himself as one of many, knowing the right tempo to play as part of the ensemble and the proper tone to establish as soloist. Cruyff saw through the chaos of the contest, slowing the play down, never anxious, always anticipating every angle of each pass before it developed. With machine-like precision, Cruyff could calculate in a moment the best placement of the ball, creating an opportunity for success. Content to be a support on the back or organized in the middle as one of many interlocking parts, Cruyff knew when to burst out front and push the play forward, never disrupting the delicate harmony and the balance of team play. Cruyff urged everyone to perform in the same key, all blended together, not one jarring note. Cruyff opposed the backwardness of the soccer establishment, fiercely confronting the hypocrisy of power. “Cruyff got into all kinds of conflicts,” Dutch journalist Hubert Smeets said. The reason: “he started asking the question the whole generation was asking, Why are things organized like this?”
While Cruyff’s style altered the landscape of modern soccer, a group of Dutch performance artists known as the Provos (provocateurs) were challenging the entire social and political structure of Holland. Inspired by a range of eclectic ideas from anarchism and Dada to the cultural theory of Herbert Marcuse and Marquis de Sade, the Provos combined nonviolence and absurdist humor in search of social change (the Provos were the clown counterparts to the Merry Pranksters, Diggers, and Yippies in 1960s America). Their entertaining public performances and exhibitions were farcical spectacles, which included “Happenings” and “Be-Ins” attacking the racism and alienation endemic in Dutch society. Dutch young people were inspired, and new artists were emerging daily. A new political movement known as the Kabouters (the Gnomes) was born, successfully running candidates for public office.
The Provos were deeply influenced by Il Ruzzante’s (Angelo Beolco) commedia dell’arte and the satire of Moliere as well as the modern era’s greatest progenitor of popular theater, Nobel Prize�
�winning Italian playwright Dario Fo. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Fo realized his dream of a “popular theater, a literature, an artistic expression that spoke to everyone and is relevant,” as he described in his book Tricks of the Trade. This period in Italy was one of political turmoil and instability. From judicial corruption to government-sanctioned murders of leftists, Italy was reeling. During this time, Fo created some of the most intelligent and dynamic theater of the twentieth century. His achievements include Guerra di popolo in cile (The People’s War in Chile), Non si paga, non si paga! (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!), and Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist). In 2004, Fo set his satirical sights on Italy’s notorious prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The result is the hilariously surreal play Two-Headed Anomaly, portraying Berlusconi sharing Russia’s Vladimir Putin’s brain as a two-and-a-half foot dwarf. Fo described the special kinship he felt with Molière and Beolco, who were both mocked and censored by the leading men of letters of their times. They “were despised for bringing onto the stage the everyday life, joys, and desperation of the common people; the hypocrisy and arrogance of the high and mighty; and the incessant injustice,” Fo said. “And their major, unforgivable fault was this: In telling these things, they made people laugh. Laughter does not please the mighty.”
Comedians and satirists from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor to Lewis Black know this all too well, Pryor in particular. Playwright Neil Simon called Pryor “the most brilliant comic in America.” He was a groundbreaking social critic taking on racism with brutal honesty. Criticized for his use of profanity and street language, Pryor responded. “A lie is profanity,” he said. “A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth, especially about oneself.”
Throughout history, poets have been at the center of creative response as both influencers and innovators. In the quest to present a sharper view of reality, poets serve to reframe the image and adjust the sound of our public conversations, finding the exact words to rouse a new consciousness. Current U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Levine went to work as an auto assembler at a very early age. While sorting universal joints—a coupling that allows rods to bend in a drive-shaft—he chatted with a black coworker named Eugene. Their discussion led Levine to write his groundbreaking poem “They Feed They Lion.” As they sorted, Levine and Eugene placed the joints in burlap sacks with “Detroit Municipal Zoo” written on them. “And he laughed, and said, ‘They feed they lion they meal in they sacks,’” Levine recalls. “And I thought, ‘This guy’s a genius with language.’ He laughed when he said it, because he knew that he was speaking an English that I didn’t speak, but that I would understand, of course. He was almost parodying it, even though he appreciated the loveliness of it. It stuck in my mind, and then one night just after the riots in Detroit—I’d gone back to the city to see what had happened—somehow I thought of that line.”
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