Seeing Red: Stephen Turner

‘Not Seeing Red‘

Seeing Red, a superb new documentary by Annie Goldson, concerns the New Zealand filmmaker Cecil Holmes and the event of his ‘outing’ as a communist in the late 1940s. Holmes worked for the new National Film Unit. He was young, handsome and concerned about issues of social justice; he was also a member of the communist party, then reasonably active in the trade union movement. A stolen letter to the Public Service Association, in which Holmes makes light of manipulating a planned stop-work meeting, was leaked to the nation’s newspapers, creating a local Red scare and a handy diversion for a Labour government under pressure from critics. The incident led initially to Holmes’ dismissal and eventually to his leaving the country for good.

Seeing Red tells this story. Both documentary and detective story it is a fine example of filmic salvage which reconstructs an intriguing moment of national history. The event of Holmes’ dismissal brings together a number of issues that extend beyond film history and are of interest today – the first wave of nationalism during the wartime years, a consensus which later fragmented the role of filmmaking in nation building, the relation between filmmaking and its funding and the right of government to use public money to promote its own agenda (the question “what is propaganda?” arises). Political and historical concerns are here inseparable.

Yet it is the look of the film that is most striking and perhaps what lingers most after viewing. Various elements are woven together in seamless storytelling – people speaking who actually either knew Holmes or lived through the same historical moment, clips from contemporary newsflashes and the NFU’s Weekly Review , interviews with Holmes at various periods of later life, all spliced together inside a re-enactment of the drama of his outing. The NFU tea lady recounting her experience of the Spanish Civil War against a backdrop of war images vividly contextualises the period. This story is compelling and well told.

History itself is always at stake in documentary making, and Seeing Red raises questions as to how history is told. The film considers the rising workers’ movements of the late 30s and 40s, a romantic and revolutionary force which engaged the attention of contemporary filmmakers. Holmes’ own good looks and political energy make him very much a part of this historical moment. The lack of clear policy at the new film unit, says film historian Jonathan Dennis, also helped to create a moment of radicalisation, which was eventually squashed by the government’s increasing control over NFU production. Before he left New Zealand Holmes made New Zealand’s first openly left-wing documentary, Fighting Back. Meanwhile the NFU returned to making scenic films.

The film itself takes a moderate attitude towards this political filmmaker. It does not ’see red’ in the sense that it is not angry. Instead, true to its NFU sources, it warms to the celebratory air of the early Weekly Review, which portrayed, albeit poetically, the nationalist vision of a caring welfare state. Holmes talks about the difficulties of trying to air more controversial issues of social justice – ‘to get something in’ – whilst working within the confines of a government enclosure. Suprisingly the older Holmes never seems bitter about his experience; but then he is not asked about it and talks instead about his work for the NFU. Seeing Red is an historical film about politics rather than a political film about history.

In the end Seeing Red is only superficially about communism. The problems of the conditions under which filmmakers operate necessarily haunts the film. It does not question what possibilities might exist for independent filmmaking in this culture. Yet this remains its historical agenda – the constraints placed upon social commentary by a rigged consensus. The young Cecil Holmes would have appreciated the style of this work of national biography but might have considered it a missed opportunity to get something else in. In our own highly nationalistic moment the film at least offers us an opportunity to ’see red’ for ourselves.