Customer Reviews

The Internationale

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a documentary that tells how a song has been used to honor the poor and working class all over the world. It has been translated into many languages and is still sung at many events. The images presented, as well as the interviews with Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg and Dorothy Healey, call attention to the plight of workers everywhere. It is the story of a song that, once you hear it, you keep hearing it in your head. A very moving documentary.

Great Movie. Stirring, epic, all those things. Wonderful to see Pete Seeger, Archie Green and all the rest talking about this beautiful song and it's complicated history.

This short documentary about the Internationale, narrated in large part by Pete Seeger and featuring interviews with a dozen or so activists of old and young generations and many nationalities, is both inspiring and informative. The film traces the history of the song from its composition in 1871, its adoption by radicals around the world as a call for worker solidarity and a new, more just world, its institutionalization by the Soviet totalitarian state, and its rediscovery by younger activists around the world today.

The co-optation of the Internationale by a brutally repressive regime is one of the great ironies in the song's history. Many of the older activists who were interviewed admit that, while they retain strong emotional bonds to the song, they're troubled by one of its lines: "No more tradition's claims shall bind us." Their point is that a the left movement whose signal song was the Internationale was in fact co-opted by a very pernicious tradition indeed.

That's why Billy Bragg, with Pete Seeger's encouragement, wrote a more recent version of the lyrics, one that, as Bragg says, tries to rescue the song from a rather dead iconic status and revitalize it for today's progressive movement. My only complaint with the film is that we were given only snippets of the new version. (But the whole thing can easily be found on the internet.)

The film's archival footage of the great depression, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, farm workers in the Philippines and U.S., dissident students in China, and young Democratic Socialists of America members is especially good. Highly recommended.

very moving film - about the time when people had hope and ideals and were prepared to make great sacrifices for them - also a little sad that those ideals have disappeared into history and replaced with our present day selfishness - music of course inspiring

I expect to hear the original song, or some viarations of it... Nothing! You hear people talking about it for 30+ minutes...