It is difficult to describe John Gianvito’s documentary, Profit motive and the whispering wind, although the film is astonishingly simple. Inspired by Howard Zinn's classic revisionist book, A People's History of the United States, the movie is composed almost entirely of stationary long takes that show us monuments––gravesites, statues, and plaques––dedicated to Americans who, in one form or another, have advanced the cause of liberty. There is no voiceover narration, and very little text other than what you see written on the monuments themselves. In other words, for 58 minutes, you’re staring at a lot of inanimate objects. Sounds pretty boring, right? It is not.

Gianvito, a cinema scholar who has worked at the Harvard Film Archive and currently teaches at Emerson College in Boston, is a master of his medium. He understands that motion pictures are not strictly about moving images, but about how those images relate to sound and to time and to each other. Shot and edited over a three year period, Profit motive and the whispering wind is the work of a filmmaker who is unusually sensitive to his surroundings––to the way sunlight casts itself over the dimpled surfaces of aged stone, or to the percussive sound of raindrops beating onto leaves. The film induces a meditative state, hypnotizes by the specificity of the places to which the film seemingly transports you (not surprisingly, Gianvito has edited a collection of interviews with Andrei Tarkovsky, another director famous for holding his audience’s attention with a camera that’s largely still).

But watching Profit motive and the whispering wind, you may also find yourself by turns angry and sad. The Americans Gianvito’s film honors are not presidents and tycoons; they are labor leaders, abolitionists, suffragists, writers and other assorted radicals, many of whom died directly as a result of their efforts to make this country a better place. At a time when so many American political documentaries are loud, broad, abrasive, and didactic, Gianvito has made a movie about outrage that can best be described as quiet.

Gianvito recently spoke to Fanzine by email about his latest film and the American radical tradition. (For those readers who live in or near New York City, Profit motive and the whispering wind plays this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival.)

FANZINE: Recently, you told a Cinema Scope interviewer that, living in Massachusetts you have, you have "always had a fondness for cemeteries." Obviously, with our country's colonial history there were bound to be a surfeit of New England monuments for you to shoot. And yet clearly you visit a number of sites that are not local to you. How much of the country did you actually traverse in making the movie? And what effect, if any, did this travel have on the project?


JOHN GIANVITO: I shot the film over three summers when I wasn't teaching. During the school year I would undertake the bulk of the research and detective work to identify the sites I hoped to visit and to work out some kind of itinerary. There was only one far western swing where I flew into Los Angeles, rented a car, and a made a sojourn up the coast as far as Seattle, then over to Montana and Nebraska and concluding in Colorado. There were a couple of trips that carried me from Boston through the Midwest and down to Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia and elsewhere.

It's certainly occurred to me how much more difficult this would have been if gas prices were what they are now. Towards the end of the shooting process I became interested in filming a site in Honolulu (of the grave of Robert W. Wilcox) but I just couldn't swing the expense. Ultimately, I am well aware that there remain many other individuals and event markers that comprise this ”other history” that my film pays tribute to, but I hope there is sufficient breadth there and that the film speaks to the broader spirit of these energies.

As for what effect the travel itself had on the project, it's hard to say. It did of course put me in a prolonged meditative space as I traveled alone for most of the shooting, wandered the cemeteries for hours and sometimes days alone, and had my own personal relation with each site as I stood before it. No doubt this contemplative state transmitted itself into the evolution of the film's form.