Lizzie Borden burst into international film consciousness when her debut feature, Regrouping, screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) in 1976. Presented in a groundbreaking program called International Forum on the Avant-Garde Film (running alongside a “Psychoanalysis and the Cinema” week, which was infamously accompanied by a dense theoretical reading list), Regrouping was praised by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum for putting abstract theory into dynamic practice. While it was shelved for personal reasons, it offers both formal and political inspiration for the work most associated with Borden’s name, Born in Flames (1983), a feminist call to arms—quite literally. Her third feature, Working Girls (1986), completed a trilogy of films about New York feminisms and the forces of gentrification sweeping downtown culture aside. Subsequently, Borden has written and directed for film and television, and has also written for publication—she started out in the 1970s as a writer for Artforum—but it’s this radical trilogy that is closest to many viewers’ hearts.
These three films come to the Criterion Channel at an urgent moment that they meet—a moment whose engagement of forces of domination and resistance they predict. Lizzie and I first met the day after the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, when Regrouping was rescreened at the EIFF as part of a fortieth-anniversary tribute to the 1976 program curated by Kim Knowles. Our conversations are always charged by the moment, and by Lizzie’s deep, structural, and intersectional feminism. As a new generation watches these films in the context of global crisis, I’m sure many will follow the late filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who said, “We were all about ready to join the Women’s Army after seeing Born in Flames.”
Here we are in the future time of Born in Flames, but it’s not the future you imagined. How does that feel?
I never expected Born in Flames to be relevant today. I thought it would disappear over the years. The film is set in a time after the U.S. has undergone a “social-democratic cultural revolution” meant to address inequities of race, class, and gender. I had no idea we would be, decades after the film’s release, slowly creeping toward a dictatorship. I thought we would have the rights we had been fighting for and sometimes making progress toward over the years, as in freedom of choice and equal pay. But we’re facing the eradication of all that with an election that will very likely endorse a man who says he wants to be a dictator. That’s shocking to me. A lot of the calls to action that Florynce Kennedy, the civil-rights attorney and activist, makes in the film, in her role as advisor to the Women’s Army, feel even more necessary now: that one’s voice must be heard by any means possible, and that violence is sometimes necessary when fighting oppression.
In the wine world, the 1976 Judgment of Paris — a blind taste test in which California chardonnays and Bordeauxs beat out their French counterparts — is remembered as the shocking upending of long-standing order.
A similar moment looked like it was coming to the demimonde of artisanal cheese. On Monday, the winners will be announced of the Good Food awards, a prestigious honor that considers both the quality of the products and the environmental and social consciousness of the companies that produce them.
When the California-based foundation that doles them out announced the finalists in January, among the candidates was a blue cheese from Climax Foods from Berkeley, Calif. The difference between that entrant and its competitors wasn’t a silky mouthfeel or buttery flavor, but rather the fact that the Climax Blue — which is served in restaurants including Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park in New York — wasn’t made from the milk of cows or goats, but rather a blend of ingredients including pumpkin seeds, lima beans, hemp seeds, coconut fat and cocoa butter.
A plant-based “cheese” held up as an exemplar, in a blind tasting, among true dairy products? Traditional cheesemakers were shocked. As word spread about the interloper, mostly through food writer Janet Fletcher’s Planet Cheese newsletter, the controversy fomented.
The Good Foods Foundation that oversees the awards at first offered a compromise solution: If, in fact, the Climax cheese was a winner, it announced, the foundation would name a co-winner. Then the foundation would reevaluate for next year, perhaps creating a new category or moving them into the broader snacks cohort.
But behind the scenes, things were getting messy.
This week, the foundation quietly removed the Climax Blue from the list of finalists on its website but didn’t make public what had disqualified the cheese. It wasn’t the fact that it is plant-based, since those products are explicitly allowed. But it had never been an issue since a vegan cheese had never impressed the judges enough to be named a finalist.
When asked by The Washington Post about its reasoning, Good Foods Foundation executive director Sarah Weiner at first declined to say, but she said something similar had happened only three times in the awards’ 14-year history. Someone — another entrant, perhaps, or someone else in the community — can alert the foundation that a contestant might not meet the requirements they attested to, which include such things as meeting animal-husbandry guidelines where applicable and offering employees fair wages and diversity training. Weiner also wouldn’t say who tipped off the foundation about Climax.
“I think there were a lot more eyes on this particular entrant than there would be on one of the hundreds of other finalists,” she said. “Which made it more likely that someone with expertise would reach out.”
Climax CEO Oliver Zahn accused the foundation of caving to pressure from dairy cheesemakers in revoking the award. And then he spilled the curds:Climax, it turns out, wasn’t just a finalist — it was set to win the award, a fact that all parties are asked to keep confidential until the official ceremony in Portland, Ore., but was revealed in an email the foundation sent to Climax in January. Based on that information, Zahn and several of his colleagues had planned to attend, booking hotel rooms and making travel plans, until, he says, learning from this reporter that his cheese was no longer in the running.
And in the days leading up to the big event, Climax and the Good Food Foundation offered differing versions of the circumstances around the rare award revocation.
Zahn says the foundation made no attempt to reach the company to address potential questions, citing company email records. Weiner says they emailed and called the person who had submitted the application — who they learned no longer works for Climax — and then emailed another employee with no response.
Zahn says he suspects that the person who lodged the complaint is an “informant” from the dairy cheese world who has been particularly outspoken. The substance of the complaint appeared to rest on the ingredient kokum butter — which is derived from the seeds of a kokum tree’s fruit — that Climax used in an earlier version of its cheese. Kokum butter has not been designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the Food and Drug Administration. Not all ingredients need a GRAS certification: The FDA grandfathers those that have common use in food.
When Climax and the other competitors submitted their products, the Good Food Awards didn’t explicitly require GRAS certification for all ingredients. Since then, though, the foundation added GRAS certification to its rules — a move Zahn says was a belated and clumsy attempt to disqualify him. It isn’t clear when the foundation added the language, but an internet archive search showed that the new wording wasn’t there in January, after the finalists had been announced. Weiner said the awards exist to promote good foods, and that food safety is part of that definition. The addition of the language was “a clarification of our principles and standards ... rather than a new rule,” she said in an email.
Zahn says the kokum butter shouldn’t be an issue anyway: The company has replaced it with cocoa butter, which does have GRAS certification, and that’s the version he says the version he submitted for the awards. (Weiner contends that Climax submitted an ingredient list that included kokum.) Zahn says they could have worked the confusion out if they’d only known about the complaint sooner, but Weiner said the company missed a deadline to respond. “This is something we would have been happy to take a look at if they had gotten back to us in time,” she said in an email.
Another dispute between the two sides? Weiner said the Climax cheese violated a requirement that any product submitted for an award be ready for retail sale, but Zahn insists the cheese is retail-ready.
Weiner called the controversy around Climax and its ultimate disqualification “a big bummer,” but said it showed how much the food community cares about the foundation’s mission. “Our way of making change is to celebrate the good as opposed to call out the bad,” she says. “But other people are good at that.”
Zahn, though, was left frustrated. For his fledgling company, a Good Food Award would have attracted potential buyers for retail stores and impressed would-be investors. Instead, he was soured by the experience — and pretty sure he won’t submit entrants in future years. “Changing the rules six months after submission, and then not even trying to reach the company to try to fix a fixable situation? If that happened in my company, I would step down as CEO,” he says. “Seriously, I would step down because that would be so embarrassing to me that there was no way I could justify continuing to run the company. And I would fire anybody who was involved.”
The to-do wasn’t just a tempest in a cheese pot, the kind of infighting you might find in any industry. Writ large, a plant-based cheese’s ascension to the top of a prestigious heap might be a bellwether moment, an inflection point in the evolution of vegan cheese from rubbery-textured punchline to a product worthy of sitting alongside some of the country’s top cheddars and tommes. And the pushback might offer a preview of the battle that could play out over supermarket shelf space and even the word “cheese” itself.
To Zahn, the method he’s using isn’t all that different from the one used for centuries. When it comes down to it, he notes, plants fuel the animals that produce milk — and so in concocting a milk made out of plants, Zahn says he’s just cutting out the middleman (or middle-bovine). In his analysis of traditional cheesemaking, a cow is essentially a processing machine — and not a very efficient one at that.
“There’s a lot of energy being used to turn something from one thing to another, and in the case of a cow, 90 percent of the inputs go to just processing,” he says. “There is no factory you could potentially devise that would come with that much processing.”
But traditional cheesemakers see the companies making vegan products as simply operating in another business entirely.
“These are engineered products. And they’re part of a financialized food system that’s fueled by venture capital and disconnected from nature,” says Mateo Kehler, co-owner of the family-run Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. Kehler’s cheese has previously won Good Food awards, and his bark-wrapped, bloomy-rind Harbison cheese is a finalist this year. “You have these technological products, but they rely on adjacency to the value proposition that we have created — through labor and through creating products that are truly connected to a landscape, to a farming system, and to our collective human history.”
“One could make the argument that this is like a fraudulent cheese,” Kehler said. “As a cheesemaker, it’s a fraud. It looks like a cheese. It might taste like a cheese. But it’s not. It’s not connected to our historical understanding of what cheeses are.”
Kehler appreciates that consumers might want to buy foods that take less of a toll on the environment. But, he says, his farm and ones like it have a much smaller environmental footprint than many of the crops, such as almonds, that are used to create many vegan products. “The people are compelling,” he says of the vegan cheese companies. “The foundational principles and the big ideas are really compelling — like the idea of fully disrupting industrial agriculture. But that’s not what’s happening.”
From a taste perspective, Zahn understands the bad rap that vegan cheese has gotten, or at least what he describes as the “first generation” of the products that rely on artificial flavorings, gums, starches and oils with results that are often bouncy and gummy. But the category is evolving, with companies making high-end products that more closely mimic the real thing, often using culturing and aging processes similar to the traditional methods. Vegan cheese shops have opened from Los Angeles to Atlanta. Big food companies are delving in.
For the Good Food awards, a panel of judges taste entrants without knowing their brands. In the cheese category, judges may learn whether the samples are from cow or goat’s milk — or in the case of Climax, from plants. Weiner indicated that the judges were aware that they were trying a vegan entrant. “Very impressive for being vegan but obviously plant-based,” was one judge’s written comment, she relayed.
“The fact that they selected us to make it this far is exciting, and a testament to the fact that we don’t need cows,” Zahn says.
Janet Fletcher, the newsletter author who has been following the controversy, says it has stoked an unusual level of drama in a typically collegial industry. “For some farmers, it feels almost like an insult to say that their product could be compared to something created in the lab,” she says.
The Good Food awards matter, she says. They might not be something the average consumer is aware of, but retailers often look for the imprimatur when seeking out high-quality, ethically sourced goods.
The incident also brings up the question of semantics. Can you call something “cheese” that has nothing to do with animals? We’ve been here with milk: When alternatives, starting with soy, began making inroads, the dairy industry pushed back. They ultimately lost, with the Food and Drug Administration releasing guidelines allowing plant-based products to be labeled and marketed as milk, but the battle has continued: Last year, the Milk Processor Education Program brought back its iconic milk-mustache motif in a faux advertisement in which actress Aubrey Plaza plays the CEO of a company that makes an unappealing “wood milk,” a clear jab at the alt-milk industry.
Miquela Hanselman, director of regulatory affairs for the National Milk Producers Federation, says vegan products don’t meet the federally prescribed standards of identity for cheese, either. “Our stance is basically the same — if you’re going to use the word cheese on your package, and you’re not going to qualify it with ‘substitute’ or ‘alternative’ that is pretty boldly out there and explain the differences, then it shouldn’t be on the label.”
Marjorie Mulhall, senior director of policy for the Plant Based Food Association, says labeling is just a matter of making things easier for shoppers. “Using cheese terminology helps consumers locate plant-based foods to meet their needs,” she said in an email.
Zahn insists he isn’t hung up on terminology, and would defer to consumers on the matter. And while he says he doesn’t want to offend traditional cheesemakers and instead hopes they can coexist, he challenges his skeptics to have an open mind. “Maybe there is a fear about us infringing or replacing them, but I don’t see it that way — I just want us all to work together towards the better,” he says. “The other thing I would tell them is to taste it themselves. Do they like it?”
Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Critics Choice
If you’re at the movie theater seeing Challengersthis weekend as you should be, keep an eye out for Tom Holland. The former Billy Elliot took to Instagram to voice his support for the film, posting the official poster with the caption, “I know what I’m doing this weekend!” Sure, he might be going to support his Spider-Man costar-turned-girlfriend Zendaya, who leads and executive produced the film — but let’s not jump to conclusions. As the box office predictions suggest, you don’t have to be dating Zendaya to be lining up to go see this movie. So let’s speculate on some other reasons that Tom Holland could be going to see Challengers, apart from the fact that his girlfriend is in it.
• He wants to see if the boys kiss. • He wants to show his support to fellow British person Josh O’Connor. • He loves tennis! • He’s studying how big of a threat Mike Faist is to his role in the upcoming Fred Astaire biopic. • He has seen the incredible things Luca Guadagnino has done for other twinks and is ready for his turn. • He’s really in the mood for a blue ICEE. • Amy Pascal invited him. • He heard there was a Spider-Man reference in it. • He’s absolutely obsessed with New Rochelle, NY and would watch any movie set there. • He’s excited to see big ol’ ears represented on screen. • He’s an AMC Stubs A-List member. • Churro kink.
On April 24, students, faculty, and community members assembled on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin to demonstrate against the complicity of the university administration in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Fearing a repeat of the upheavals that have taken place at Columbia University and elsewhere around the country, campus authorities mobilized a massive number of police in response. Yet despite arrests and violence, the demonstrators ultimately outlasted and outmaneuvered the police. In the following report, participants describe what they learned.
Student-led solidarity actions at universities have been taking place for six months already. In the last week, however, they have escalated, with encampments and walkouts at over 40 campuses across the country. Students as far away as Australia, Italy, and France have organized their own encampments and other protests in solidarity. In the last 48 hours, new encampments have appeared on at least fourteen US campuses, including at least three encampments—in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC—that are cross-institutional collaborations. Police have evicted some of these, but others continue to hold their ground. Over that same period of time, at least six schools have hosted walkout demonstrations. Two school encampments took over campus buildings.
In the wake of the events described below, UT faculty members published a courageous statement in support of the demonstrators and joined some of the student organizers who were arrested yesterday in organizing a massive rally for today, which drew 2000 people to the South lawn. In speeches, some of the student activists directly connected the ongoing movement to the nationwide uprising that took place in 2020 in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others.
Defending specific territory gives a movement a place to cohere and opens up a space in which the participants can build relationships and go through a process of political development. At the same time, it provides adversaries a fixed target against which to direct pressure. Defending encampments in the open is more challenging than defending indoor occupations, even if the latter can entail greater legal risk. In both cases, what happens outside and around the police response usually determines the outcome at least as much as what occurs inside the occupation. As the building occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt demonstrated, police can only besiege and evict occupations if they are not themselves besieged.
Current campus organizers might benefit from reading participants’ reflections on the “autonomous zones” of the 2020 uprising:
Even if our goal is simply to hold a particular physical space, we have to prioritize carrying out offensive activities throughout society at large that can keep our adversaries on the defensive, while investing energy in the activities that nourish movements and spaces rather than focusing on defending particular boundaries. We should understand occupied spaces as an effect of our efforts, rather than as the central cause we rally around.
Centrist media outlets have dishonestly portrayed the participants in these demonstrations as “anti-Semitic,” intentionally obscuring the fact that a significant plurality of the organizers are anti-Zionist Jews. In fact, only four months ago, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas voted against barring members from associating with Nazis and Holocaust deniers after a prominent Texas Republican hosted a well-known white supremacist and anti-Semite. Those who are repressing these demonstrations are the ones with ties to organized anti-Semitism. As students chanted yesterday in Austin, “APD, KKK, IDF they’re all the same!”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintains that the Israeli military is still determined to carry out a ground assault on Rafah, where over a million refugees are currently crowded. If the events of the past six months are any indication, should such an invasion take place, it will result in the deaths of at least tens of thousands more Palestinians, disproportionately impacting women and children. This is the horrific scenario that demonstrators are mobilizing to prevent. Everyone who aspires to stand in solidarity with Palestinians should be thinking right now about what they can do to prevent Netanyahu from ordering a ground assault on the people in Rafah.
Students assembling with umbrellas on the night of April 24 to defend the Gaza solidarity encampment at Emerson University. Police carried out a massive raid shortly afterwards, arresting 108 people and leaving blood all over the pavement.
University of Texas Austin Students Take the Lawn
On April 24, 2024, students, faculty, and community members converged at the University of Texas at Austin campus (UT) to protest the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The initial protest, a walkout from classes and a Popular University spearheaded by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, drew several hundred people to the area surrounding the Gregory Gymnasium. At the behest of the University President Jay Hartzell, an unprecedented array of militarized police immediately attacked the protest, including mounted police officers, heavily armed state troopers (some bussed in from Houston), and officers from the Austin and the University of Texas police departments. Over the next six hours, thousands bravely confronted the police officers, playing a game of cat and mouse across campus that culminated in an hours-long standoff in the South Lawn. Eventually, the police were forced to withdraw and the crowd won control of the Lawn.
Unable to countenance any resistance to the ongoing acts of violence they sponsor, US authorities have deployed police to universities across the country, including New York University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Southern California, Emory, and Emerson. UT Austin was no outlier to this emerging dynamic. Before the protest even began, the University was prepared to deploy police in large numbers.
As soon as people assembled, police wasted no time charging and snatching people from the crowd, clubbing and pushing without provocation. The crowd persevered, repeatedly routing officers or surrounding them in larger and larger concentric circles. On multiple occasions, small clusters of officers found themselves enclosed on all sides by crowds that outnumbered them by an order of magnitude. In the end, it was the police who gave up and left campus in defeat.
The dedication and creativity of these demonstrators is worth celebrating. Our contemporaries at encampments in universities across the country have provided us with their own hard-earned insights and reflections. In return, we send warm greetings to them and humbly offer a few reflections on yesterday’s events for our comrades struggling at UT Austin and to those elsewhere who are still planning their next moves.
Bold Actions, Bold Words—Courage Is Contagious
All of the police tactics aimed to instill fear: large numbers, riot gear, horses towering over the crowd, vague commands, snatching protestors one by one.
Demonstrators did not succumb to fear—and were rewarded for their courage. When police grabbed the first person, students surged forward chanting “Let them go,” encircling the police cruisers and lining up face to face with helmeted police. Bold actions resonated broadly in the crowd. The crowd took space forcefully, eventually kettling the police on the walkway. It was tense and sweaty, with a steep learning curve, but five hours of facing off with the police made the crowd more confident, not less.
No More Wait and See!
Twenty minutes into the action, the march became headless. But it was never directionless, and its refusal to be controlled was a strength.
Moments of stagnation, imposed both from within and without, repeatedly gave the police the opportunity to make the first move. In these moments, the words and improvised gestures of individuals enabled the crowd to develop its collective intelligence. Whenever the cops succeeded in splitting us between police lines, on opposite sides of a thoroughfare, on opposite sides of a building, our calls to action flowed like water around them.
Proposals spread throughout the crowd. Some fizzled out. Others caught on, sparked enthusiasm, and spread like wildfire until the whole crowd shared a goal. The lawn! We’re taking the lawn!
Students succeeded in achieving the goal of taking the lawn by choosing not to wait for instructions and by getting creative, finding and showing each other back routes to it. Police attempted to block the march on a main road, but participants split up and dashed through alleys, hopped down stairs, ducked around bushes and into buildings. Doors were propped open and hundreds poured through them onto the unguarded lawn. Passing through these buildings was a baptismal moment.
In Europe, this strategy of breaking up and reforming on the other side of obstacles is called five fingers make a fist.
Keep Moving, but Don’t Run Away
The march was most successful when the participants maintained the initiative, moving before the police moved them. In the most inventive moments, the crowd remained mobile, responding to dispersal orders and impenetrable police lines by spontaneously redirecting the march.
Sometimes, in protest movements, crowds simply flee from confrontations in hopes of “remaining flexible.” Thankfully, this is not what happened at UT. There is a balance between confronting obstacles and remaining unpredictable. While it is necessary to make the best of moments when we are forced back or out, in the long run, movements need to be able to force out the police. Instead of engaging in protracted face-offs and waiting to be dispersed or moved, we should take this lesson from Thursday to heart: fight where it is possible; where it isn’t, remain mobile.
Surround Them
Despite their heavy-handed tactics, the police failed to control the crowd. They had the lawn, but we had everything else. All afternoon, students, faculty, and community members flowed into and around the South Mall. Police got themselves surrounded repeatedly, and eventually had to push through the crowd to obtain access to food and water. Protesters could have done more to take advantage of that moment. Spatially speaking, as long as the police occupied the lawn, we had the upper hand.
While they had to defend their precarious position against wave after wave of students, we could come and go, regroup, take breaks. When horse-mounted cops rushed the crowd in order to sweep the sidewalk, they weren’t attempting to control the crowd or push us anywhere in particular. They were trying to escape.
Make Space(s) Worth Defending
To sustain momentum, especially the momentum of an occupation, people must have a vision of what they are fighting to defend, what they want to create together. Spaces of joyful imagination and exuberance give us momentum and direction even when there is not a line of police or enemies to confront. Chanting can keep spirits high during the direct confrontations, but nobody can shout all day, and the energy of the space dies along with the chant. Blankets over the lawn become supply depots, where the distribution of pizza or hand sanitizer becomes a site for the collective reproduction of our lives. Office supplies become the ingredients for a direct-action training. These efforts reproduce themselves in ways that words alone cannot.
As soon as we occupy a space together, we should fill it up. Every friend, classmate, coworker should be called to join us, bringing things to sustain the space and refresh the front lines. Food, water, games, activities, and music can provide an anchor for our resistance. What we do together in these moments will shape what we will be capable of doing with the rest of our lives.
With a little more initiative, small organized groups could have taken advantage of the situation to greater effect. Much of the campus was left vulnerable. That being said, the confidence built by yesterday’s events was obvious to anyone who remained on the lawn. It will only continue to grow. For now, some university faculty have declared “No classes, no grading, no work,” and will be gathering at noon to pick up where yesterday left off. [Editor’s note: at the time of publication, this had already occurred; see the introduction for details.] The concession of the lawn by the administration represents a definitive win.
What happens next will be determined by those who are willing to continue taking bold action. The circumstances demand it of us. Do what is necessary to stop the genocide in Gaza. Defeat is not an option.
Daniel Goldhaber’s climate-activism thriller deftly combines human drama with sincere political exploration
by Josh Lewis
Adapted from the 2021 nonfiction manifesto of the same name by human ecology lecturer and climate activist Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a white-knuckle thriller that takes revolutionary political arguments about the viability violent sabotage as a tool against fossil fuels/CO2 emissions and places them into both dramatic logistical practice and a righteous, furious act of self-defense in the face of the real human suffering and despair of late-capitalism.
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber (whose debut film Cam was a timely combination of both the authentic reality of sex work and parasocial, online horror filmmaking), this sophomore feature traces a group of activists led by Xochitl (Ariela Barer), a radical and determined college dropout whose mother tragically passed away during an unexpected heat wave. The film offers an opportunity for pyrotechnics to anyone who, like her, is dissatisfied by the passive and incremental steps being taken to address what is indisputably an issue of apocalyptic proportions.
Deftly cutting between the nuts-and-bolts direct action of their radical mission to blow up a Texas pipeline—including the recruitment process, literal building and tense transportation of IEDs, and the tactical planning of property destruction with the least human collateral damage possible—and the sympathetic backgrounds that brought this crew together, we gradually accrue the weight of their decision to take action. Goldhaber’s depiction of the unbearable tension of the work (which stylistically lands somewhere between the sweaty, patient doom of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and the concentrated, desperate viciousness of the Safdie brothers’ Good Time) ultimately reveals an uncomfortable truth about the necessity of overcoming our natural desire to resist danger in order to better serve the goals of this political project–depicted here with a rigorous, almost instructional action-heist quality that chews through one suspense sequence after another: one of tires being slashed, of strap-threads tearing, and of explosive powder carried over bumpy roads.
The film’s closest companion in terms of its subject matter is maybe Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, which similarly adheres itself to the tough reality and procedure of eco-terrorism; but where Reichardt opted for a bleak, dispiriting moral compromise, Pipeline offers an overwhelming and powerful conviction.
Like Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Pipeline adheres itself to the tough reality and procedure of eco-terrorism.
It helps that the script (co-written with Goldhaber by Jordan Sjol and star Areila Barer), while lean and functional in all the right ways a thriller should be, is fuelled by a genuine sense for the rippling pain of climate disaster. For something that could’ve easily been approached at a didactic remove is instead–with the help of the film’s editor Daniel Garber–a sharp, non-linear story that ties this ugly, necessary work to brief-but-clarifying emotional histories; like Theo (Sasha Lane), whose childhood spent playing in the acidic rain near local oil fields has resulted in leukemia, or Michael (Forrest Goodluck) and Dwayne (Jake Weary), whose blue-collar Texas and indigenous backgrounds inherently challenge the corporate seizure of land to build the steel monstrosities responsible for poisoning us. It’s a clever cinematic merging of the collective and the personal and how they inform one another that crops lot throughout the film, like the image of a hole being dug for their explosive barrel visually infected by and transported to Xochitl’s mother being lowered into the ground at her funeral.
In the past, the goal of capturing this visceral, human element around an ideological project has frequently been done in the name of bankrupt ambiguity. An intellectually lazy way of inserting a “both sides are sort of in the wrong” shrug, and if there’s any more praise to throw on Goldhaber and his team (and there is plenty; the dirty, yet glowing 16mm photography courtesy of cinematographer Tehillah De Castro; or Gavin Brivik’s pulsing, spacey soundtrack; plus some fantastic elemental location work in North Dakota and Texas) it is that they not only deftly avoid this pitfall but appear to be making a strict argument against it.
There are certainly opposing voices heard in the film, as the crew themselves differ in opinion about the effectiveness of nonviolent protest, the history of achieving political goals in America (i.e. the civil rights movement), and minute details like who will be hurt by the eventual price-gouging that occurs due to their action. But these voices are not heard simply to poke holes in the mission, but to acknowledge and reaffirm the commitment to it, not unlike Gillo Pontercorvo’s blunt, unglamorous depiction of the use of force and achieving political goals under violent conditions in Battle of Algiers—one of, if not the greatest piece of guerrilla resistance cinema.
In many ways, the diverse and complex feeling of powerlessness that stems from those realities is the subject of the film itself, and by merging the sensitive character drama of the team’s shared connection through the collective understanding that destruction and death are imminent (individually, politically, etc) with genuinely methodical genre thrills, Pipeline eventually builds to its own intensely cathartic sense of control.
It’s a motivating formal argument that echoes Malm’s critiques of pacifism and fatalism by depicting urgency and fear as tools that can be weaponized by a team devoted to achieving a tangible goal.
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