The Trotsky: A Claim to Community

A distinction between an earlier and later Charles Taylor might be drawn between Charles Taylor political activist versus Charles Taylor intellectual. (1) Certainly nature of writing going on in a political tract like The Pattern of Politics (1970) (2) is at removes from intellectual forays into malaise of modernity or crisis of self and identify. I won't attempt to square what an earlier Taylor says with a later Taylor. But Taylor's politics were local enough in 1960s to make a book he wrote during that time pertinent 1o what I want to say about The Trotsky (2009), a film shot entirely in Montreal and engaged in its own way with radical Canadian politics. I am not applying a Taylorian reading to film than suggesting that film itself is a reading of this particular political text of Taylor's--that movie ingests and thereby depicts some of us most pertinent lessons. Even if a later Taylor does not square with an earlier Taylor, what The Trotsky attempts is to make something like politics of polarization matter once again, which is to say it attempts to reclaim some of lessons put forward in The Pattern of Politics. One could also say this film attempts to reclaim dialectic, in particular notion that holds conflict (between clearly opposing viewpoints) as lynchpin of social change. How film reinterprets dialectic will be considered here. The premise of film that a young Montreal teenager, Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel), believes himself to be living embodiment of Leon Trotsky reincarnated suggests it is not beyond pale to think about things like having another's soul occupy one's body, and, from there, to consider whether ontology of film facilitates a discussion of reincarnation (another's soul trapped in a body eerily present to us) or rather, something like reverse (a body occupying another's soul). I raise these examples in consideration of ontological differences between what Cavell calls, simply, (stage actor) and (screen actor). What we might nowadays call 1960s (Canadian) counterculture, auteuring a film explicitly aimed at youth of Canada. Whether or not Pierre Trudeau is a galvanizing figure for today's youth or not, those who are curious to know him are likely to know him through Colm Fiore. I don't mean that Fiore's persona trumps Trudeau's. Indeed, Fiore interprets Trudeau way a stage actor interprets a character. But Fiore, in interpreting Trudeau, is interpreting a star, or, say, Trudeau's star-like quality and not a character, To play role of Trudeau, he must get his persona to match Trudeau's. Others may come along, not with different interpretations, but something like better impersonations. (4) Yet for a generation at least (or for a generation of Canadian youth interested in 1960s Canadian counterculture now), simply by having appeared to us as Trudeau on screen, Fiore's persona will invoke or be caught up with Trudeau (though not vice versa). Fiore is, or has achieved, a reincarnation of Trudeau. The [stage] actor's role is his subject (or study, and there is no end to it. But screen performer is essentially not an actor at all: he is subject of study, and a study not his own. (That is what content of a photograph is--its subject.) On a screen study is projected; on a stage actor is projector. An exemplary stage performance is one which, for a time, most fully creates a character. After Paul Scofield's performance in King Lear, we know who King Lear is, we have seen him in flesh. An exemplary screen performance is one in which, at a time, a star is born. After The Maltese Falcon, we know a new star, only distantly a person. means the figure created in a given set of films. His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, mane would not mean what it does. …

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