The political organization “The Green Left Org" published the below article on its homepage, which looks at the classic film “The Wide Blue Roadâ€, and relates it to today's fishing industry:
In a remote and picturesque fishing village on an island off the coast of Southern Italy, the local men have lined up to sell their fish to the owner of the only refrigerator in town. With this economic leverage, he forces them not only to accept a lower-than-market price but his insults as well.
Squarcio (Yves Montand) manoeuvres to the front of the line with his catch, which is rich with yellowfin tuna and sea bream that can command high prices on the mainland, where the wealthy live. Unlike the other men, Squarcio relies neither on skill nor uses a seine. His secret, which is common knowledge in the village, even to the local cop, is that he uses dynamite.
In one of the opening scenes in The Wide Blue Road we see Squarcio at work. While sitting on a seaside rock with an artillery shell clenched between his knees, he struggles to unscrew the cap of the shell. Once it is off, he can pour the explosive powder into a homemade bomb. His two young sons stand warily at a distance watching as sweat pours from his anxious face. Perhaps Montand's riveting performance in the 1953 Wages of Fear, his first screen performance, inspired Gillo Pontecorvo to use him in the 1957 The Wide Blue Road, his debut film.
Pontecorvo went on to direct two masterpieces of left-wing film, the 1965 Battle of Algiers and the 1969 Quemada (Burn). As an Italian Communist film-maker, Pontecorvo was not the typical social realist. Starting with The Wide Blue Road, his films explore selfishness transforming itself into social consciousness. In both Battle of Algiers and Burn the transformation is completed, as the protagonists dedicate themselves to the struggle.
In The Wide Blue Road, the struggle against individualism is much more torturous. For most of the film's narrative, Squarcio is the defiant outsider. It is not so much that he seeks wealth; but he is obeying an imperative to stay above water. His instinct for survival leads him to play by his own dirty rules. He has bitter memories of being a legal fisherman. When bad weather made it impossible to fish for a number of months, he watched helplessly as his father died from lack of medical attention, which he could not afford.
When the cops are about to catch him in the act of throwing a bomb into the water, he sinks the boat, including the new motor that he paid a small fortune for. Later, facing economic ruin, he dives into the water to salvage the motor, nearly drowning in the process.
Squarcio is neither an evil person nor unlikable. All of the other fishermen, while hating his destructive practices, still like him as a person. It is only toward the climax of the film when they have formed a co-op, including a refrigerator, that their goals and his become irreconcilably opposed.
While The Wide Blue Road primarily addresses questions facing the left in the 1950s, particularly the need to forge collective bonds of working-class solidarity in a time of burgeoning individualism, it also anticipates questions that would emerge in the 1960s In 1968, Garrett Hardin published a paper called Tragedy of the Commons, which was based on the 1833 work of amateur mathematician William Foster Lloyd. Hardin tried to understand the dilemma that ranchers faced when they herded cattle on a common pasture. As a rational economic being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain, and therefore animals. However, each herdsman reaches the same result - ruin by overgrasing.
The fishermen in The Wide Blue Road try to convince Squarcio of the need to respect the commons in the beginning of the film. While he counters with the argument that he only dynamites on the open sea and not near the shore where they fish with nets, even he understands that if everybody followed his example, there would eventually be no fish.
The reality is that we are facing a tragedy of the commons on the sea today, but the instrument of its destruction is not dynamite but “improvements†in the means of production.
According to the US Food and Agriculture Administration (FAO), the present capacity of the world's fishing fleets is 200% of the world's available fisheries. Over the past 50 years, technological breakthroughs in the fishing industry have far exceeded nature's ability to reproduce itself. The biggest change has been the introduction of sonar, a wartime innovation. Many of the first new fishing trawlers were actually converted WWII submarine hunters.
In the early 1950s, new ships were built from the ground up that could catch 500 tons of fish a day. Huge trawl nets brought the catch on the deck and dumped it into onboard processing and freezing facilities. In the past, ships had to return to port quickly before the fish spoiled. Now equipped with freezers they could spend months at sea, sweeping up vast quantities of fish. They roamed the planet in search of profits. In 1970, the tonnage of all fishing boats was 13,616. In 1992 it was 25,994, a 91% increase. Capital simply flowed to the profitable fishing industry with little regard for the long-term consequences.
One of the consequences of the industrial trawling model is that large-scale production techniques generate huge amounts of waste. The nets draw unwanted species that are simply discarded. The FAO estimates that discarded fish total 27 million tons each year, about 1/3 of the total catch. This includes sea mammals, seabirds and turtles. While Greenpeace activists fight for the life of the unfortunate porpoise, many other species are disappearing without fanfare.
The Wide Blue Road deserves the widest audience possible. We are grateful to Jonathan Demme and Dustin Hoffman who have financed its reappearance this year. It is an exceptionally powerful film.
Source: The Green Left Org from - Green Left Weekly, April 7, 2004