n a year when even the most perfunctorily political film has been deemed newly relevant, it’s a 58-minute observational documentary from 2007 that, by quietly surveying the United States’ progressive past, points most perceptively to the struggle that has faced the American Left since long before 2020. A history of violence and oppression told entirely through the sites and historical markers that stand in tribute to America’s fallen and forgotten revolutionaries, John Gianvito’s reiterates a hard truth about our world: that socially inclined thought is rarely embraced, and that the minds and voices of those fighting for real change are often only appreciated by an engaged few in the rearview mirror. To the latter point, —like each of Gianvito’s films since coming to prominence (2001), including the omnibus project (2012), to which he contributed one of five segments, and the epic diptych , a nine-hour documentary comprising the features (2010) and (2015)—is instructive in the way it implicitly frames the viewer and those who preach a liberal ideology as crucial to the conception and collective memory associated with these often tragic figures and events. As Gianvito, whose cinema has dealt almost exclusively with these sorts of invisible histories, phrased it in a recent introduction to ’ newly available restoration: “the considerable, unfinished, still aspirational ideals of those who struggled before us advance or recede on our watch.”
