Sam Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker whose widely acclaimed film The Weather Underground premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and earned him a 2004 Academy Award nomination. He screened his new work Utopia in Four Movements (a "live documentary" which includes a live soundtrack from co-producer Dave Cerf and the Quavers) last weekend at the Walker Art Center. I am grateful to Mr. Green for taking a quick timeout during his tour to answer a few of my questions regarding the best of "the best of all possible worlds."
How do you define utopia?
Utopia is definitely a slippery word and concept and people attribute all sorts of meanings to it. There’s definitely “utopia” in the classical sense: some kind of idyllic society where everyone has a good job and high standard of living, we all get along, and there’s some sort of basic sense of emotional, social and spiritual harmony. This is the meaning of the word that comes out of Thomas More’s book and many of the early utiopian writings.
I’m not that interested in this version of utopia. I’m drawn to utopia almost as shorthand for something that combines a certain hopefulness with the imagination. This doesn’t have to imply a perfect world or anything like that. To me, the utopian is anything that evokes a radically better and radically different world. That can be lots of different things: a performance, a gesture, a piece of art, a moment.
What’s happening right now is utopian in my book. All the old has fallen away leaving only possibilities. I would guess that those days in Tarhir Square will be the most intense, joyful and meaningful experiences those protesters will ever have. Those moments evoke the profound possibilities of freedom and the falling away of the everyday, connections with other people, a life that is meaningful. A friend of mine in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit, recently wrote a book called A Paradise Built in Hell all about the experience of disasters and revolutions and carnival – pointing out that there’s a common experience of total exhilaration and a deep sense of purpose and connection with other people that is profoundly utopian. That’s what our lives should be like.
Is utopia a chimera or is it an unrealized potential, an inevitability even, for society?
For me at least, part of the beauty of utopia is that it cannot be fully realized – it can’t become the everyday. Again, this is my own personal feeling about utopia – this is what resonates with me. I’m not saying it’s right – it’s just what appeals to me. In this sense, utopia is always something to strive for – it’s a beacon or North Star – but it’s not something that we necessarily need to, or want to, or will attain. Eduardo Galeano said, “Utopia is like the horizon: you take two steps, and it recedes two steps. You take ten steps, and it recedes ten steps. What then is utopia for? It’s for that, the walking.”
The young folks who protested in Egypt will certainly confront a more complex, slippery and, probably, difficult time over the next six months or year as the country does the hard and often dull work of moving to some kind of democracy. But I would imagine that that experience, that profound and exhilarating opening of possibilities, in Tahrir Square changed them forever. What happened there is certainly utopian in the best sense of the word.
How do the arts relate to utopia? More specifically, how does your work as an artist relate to utopia? Could art exist in utopia? If so, what would utopian art be like?
Again, I’m not so interested in “a utopia” – some kind of place or society that would be utopia. I’m much more interested in the Utopian – a moment or gesture or act that evokes a radically better world. Art, I think, can certainly do this. In fact, art is very well-suited for the task. My own personal feeling is that art that is proscriptive, that flattens things out to bullet-points and clear-cut answers is often dull. What I like is art that embraces complexity and contradiction and the messiness of human experience and who we are. I like art that opens up possibilities. I know several artists whose work is utopian in this way: Steve Lambert. There’s a Danish artist named Daniel Saloman whose work involves Esperanto and is radical and utopian. He has created a universal currency and travels around exchanging money for these bank-notes he calls the Mono. That’s rad – it hints at possibilities and the fact that – to use the semi-hackneyed phrase – “another world is possible.”
What would your utopia be like?
My utopia would be a world where everyone on the planet has at least enough to eat, a roof over their head and decent health care and education. Pretty straightforward. For a while the UN was putting out a statistic every few years: the amount of money it would take to make that a reality. You wanna know how much it would cost? Only 60 billion dollars a year. That’s less than we are spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. The UN stopped even coming up with the figure after a while. Everybody’s response was yeah, but it’s never gonna happen. That’s totally naïve and way too idealistic – it’s utopian. Ouch. Today, “utopia” has become a pejorative. It’s weird - to me “utopian” is one of the nicest things you can say about someone or something.
