“[…] radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers.”
– Bertolt Brecht1
The three films we selected this week are looking at – and listening to – people making radio in the eighties. In the first two films, there is a deep sense of belief in the possibilities this “vast network of pipes” may offer the world; a hope that is similar to the utopian optimism surrounding the free internet in the early nineties. As the independent local radio makers in the Dardenne brothers’ R… ne répond plus (1981) “give voice” to the struggles of their communities, the women that form the feminist rebellion in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) use their DIY radio station as a means of guerrilla warfare in a post-revolutionary dystopia. Somewhat of a precursor to Uncut Gems, the third film, Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio (1988), stars Eric Bogosian as a local talk radio host who is simultaneously haunted by the pressure of going national and by his perverted fan base. All three films, each in their distinctive way, seem to inhabit Brecht’s early wish for the radio to not only speak, but also listen.
R… ne répond plusis availableon Avila.
Born in Flames is available The Criterion Channel.
Talk Radio is available on Amazon Prime.
- 1Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre. Translated and edited by Jon Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. [“Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat” in Blätter des Hessischen Landestheaters, Darmstadt, no. 16 (July 1932).]
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