Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

The documentary tells the progressive tradition of the United States through gravestones and monuments. The camera moves among the markers raised for people who changed the politics of the country with their ideas, Malcolm X and Susan B. Anthony among them, with images of trees and grass moving in the wind set between them. There is no commentary and no narrator; whatever is to be said is said by the writing on the stones and by the order they come in. It took its inspiration from the book by Howard Zinn. Because of that the film moves less like a documentary than like a visual essay, and it asks the viewer to read, to wait and to make the connection themselves. The way the names are set next to one another builds an argument on its own. John Gianvito’s fifty eight minute American documentary was completed in 2008.