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A loose adaptation of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, John Gianvito's remarkable film is a calm, patient and beautiful testament to the fallen. As Zinn shows, immigrants have shaped American history by fighting back against empowered elites. But the actions of minority radicals have too often caused their own demise.
Consisting of elegantly composed shots of gravesites and public shrines, and progressing through American history from colonial times to the present, Profit Motive is a call to arms. The resting places of famed figures as Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez and Eugene V. Debs stand alongside unfamiliar, but just as important radicals. Gianvito punctuates these scenes with the wind blowing, exemplifying the spirits of the nation's earliest victims.
"My impulses were to fashion a poem out of some of the remnants of America's past in hopes that the assembling of this historical mosaic would have things to tell us about our present – and perhaps to serve as a moral compass forward," says Gianvito in an interview with Emerson College Today. Gianvito says he hopes his film "reminds us that the past, and the lessons of the past, are ever-present around us – whether we're actively looking or not. We are, in fact, surrounded by the dead. And if we're willing to listen, to lean into the wind, they have things to tell us."
John Gianvito was born in Staten Island. He is a filmmaker, curator and professor of film at Emerson College in Boston. His films include The Flower of Pain, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein and Profit motive and the whispering wind .
"It should also be stated that Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind is not merely a good film, perhaps even a masterpiece of some sort, it is above all a unique cinematic achievement in the sense of its tremendous importance for the warmongering, cynical times we live in today..." — Jurij Meden, International Federation of Film Critics
"Extraordinary" — Variety
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