Encounters with Your Inner Trotsky Child
Jim Finn Shorts
•
21m
Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • With Lois Severin • 2013 • 21 minutes
"Encounters with Your Inner Trotsky Child also riffs on the self-help genre by reading the persecution of the Russian Marxist of the title as an allegory for finding inner peace. Mimicking the wobbly appearance of Eighties video graphics, the film employs New Age-y visualization techniques (one section is entitled “Arrogant Breath of the Puffed-Up Bourgeoisie: A Guided Meditation”) and quasi-spiritual affirmation exercises conducted by a German-speaking aerobics instructor. The better life promised by such instructions, of course, was not something that Trotsky, murdered in Mexico by Stalin’s agents, was able to achieve. Instead, the video’s narrator (Lois Severin) offers a counter history in which Trotsky evades Stalin’s reach by building an underground bunker and triumphs over his enemies. Though Encounters elicited laughter with its hyperbolic Communist rhetoric and lo-fi video effects, it also prompts a serious engagement with its central premise: that to imagine a better life for ourselves means, in part, imagining a different history." —Genevieve Yue, FILM COMMENT
Up Next in Jim Finn Shorts
-
Zinoviev's Tube
Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • With Lois Severin • 2014 • 22 minutes
In this tape—the second in the Inner Trotsky Child video series—narrator Lois Severin is back with advice for post-Berlin Wall leftists dealing with life in the Prime Material Plane of Corporate Capitalism. Instead of a s...
-
Christmas with Chávez
Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2013 • 2 minutes
Weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez came to the United Nations and delivered his "smells of sulfur" speech about Bush. After that speech, Bush was officially a lame duck—the Republicans lost the House and...
-
Great Man and Cinema
Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2009 • 4 minutes
Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, runs the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father's cult of personality. The film's title "Great Man and Cinema" comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how th...
