Nearly a decade on from a fin de siecle moment which in hindsight appears unbelievably solipsistic, a turning point bookended by the fizzled apocalypticism of the millennium bug and the jarring new realities of the Global War on Terror, the recent global financial crisis seems to have belatedly catalyzed a distinctly millenarian reconsideration of that holy grail of the 20th century, utopia. Never has the utopian impulse seemed closer to realization and yet never has its hope been so permanently extinguished than in the past century. It is precisely these events, and a concern for the century without such a hope presently yawning in front of us, that motivates filmmaker Sam Green’s new work in progress, Utopia in Four Movements.

Utopia, of course, is a highly problematic concept, starting with the word itself which, as academics love to point out, is cobbled together from the Greek words for “not” and “place”, the knowing title of Sir Thomas More’s fictional description of an ideal society. The full implications of this wordplay, utopia as no place, might be said to only be fully realized in this past century, which reformulated More’s statement negatively in Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted pronouncement that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” As a riposte, Adorno’s statement is particularly apt in light of architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt’s description of Himmler’s plans for Auschwitz as not only the death camp for which it is now infamous, but “the jewel in his crown of the German East“, an unrealized National Socialist/IG Farben “racial utopia“, to be built with forced labor from the camp. As Michael Rothberg argues, these two “visions” of Auschwitz are not opposing but interrelated. It is this tension between utopia and dystopia, between idealistic aspiration towards an unrealizable goal and despondent realization that there is no goal left to aspire to, is the territory that Utopia in Four Movements attempts to navigate.

As its title suggests, there are four parts to Utopia. The first covers not only More’s neologism and its politically-charged conceptual deployment in the 20th century, but offers a roundabout examination of the same themes in its treatment of the “universal language”, Esperanto. Invented in the late 19th century by a Jewish Polish ophthalmologist in hopes of transcending nationalistic divisions by overcoming language barriers, the most widely spoken planned language becomes here an apolitical analogue for 20th-century revolutionary movements. The language retains a loyal following to this day, but not nearly as large as at its early-20th-century peak, before the xenophobia of World War II and the mutual suspicion of the Cold War chipped away at the optimism that necessarily undergirds its practice. Contemporary practitioners of the language, caught here at the annual World Congress of Esperanto, come across largely as sanguine but inconsequential, excited by the global reach of the language, but realistic about Esperanto’s niche status; a far cry from its utopian conception. Two scenes in particular tease out the hamartia of linguistic utopia: In the first, a Brazilian man plays a song, singing in Esperanto; the song is beautiful, but the words speak of sorrow and suffering. In the second scene, which closes out the segment, Green makes the connection explicit, noting that the brutal ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia occurred between ethnic groups who had little in the way of linguistic barriers.

If, in the end, a common tongue can just as easily amplify our antagonisms as erase them, what hope can there be for explicitly political utopian movements? Utopia’s middle two movements explore the visions and limitations of modern political ideologies, starting with state communism in “The Revolution”, which surveys the left-wing movement’s legacy from the perspective of one of the few remaining countries with any realistic claim on it, Cuba. Much of the Cuban footage centers on Nehanda Abiodun, an African-American radical living in exile in Havana, wanted back home in connection with the robberies she and her comrades undertook to fund their revolutionary organization. Neither a Cuban citizen nor able to return home, Abiodun is, in a sense, permanently in limbo. She has made a life for herself in Havana, becoming a sort of matriarch to the burgeoning Cuban hip-hop scene, yet she makes clear in the film that hip-hop is more something she understands as a powerful, popular youth movement for encouraging social awareness than it is something she can identify with musically. The footage of her with headphones on, singing along eyes closed to a tape of ’70s Philadelphia soul is perhaps the most touching of the film: The revolutionary, trapped in amber.

In this sense, Abiodun is presented here as a microcosm of Cuba, a country whose “permanent revolution” also seems, at least to outside eyes, trapped in the past. We see, for example, the billboards that dot the roadside, advertising not commodities but the benefits of socialist government. One, in particular, claims that of the hundreds of millions of children in the world who will go to sleep homeless tonight, none of them will be Cuban. As Green notes, this is impressive, and probably true, but with the country’s limited access to the internet (most citizens can neither afford, nor are allowed to own computers) and the outside world, its outdated infrastructure and its authoritarian government, is this all we can hope for?

If capitalism is the offered alternative, then the third segment of Utopia, “The World’s Largest Shopping Mall”, suggests that the outlook is grim. As the title suggests, South China Mall, located in Guangdong province, is unbelievably vast but also unbelievably empty. Built in the heart of Chinese manufacturing territory and only accessible by car, the mall’s aspirations are completely out of sync with its populace, and its failure is at once tragic and comic. In the post-Cold War era, with even supposedly communist countries like China embracing many aspects of global capitalism, Green suggests that the mall is nothing less than our historical moment’s equivalent of utopia, and it is here, at long last, that the word’s Greek roots take their revenge, as the South China Mall might as well not exist for its customers. When we finally discover a pair of visitors, exactly the young, trendy couple that the mall intends to attract, we find out that they are not shopping, but instead mainly like to visit in order to be alone. Instead of shoppers, then, we get to see banners selling the idealized, Chinese version of the consumerist good life juxtaposed with shopkeepers doing their homework and falling asleep out of sheer boredom or, most absurdly of all, mall employees paid to dress up like Teletubbies and animal mascots, dancing and jigging around the empty corridors, ready to entertain customers who will never arrive.

The fantasy of the mall (a wall banner slogan reads “I Enjoy my Mall Life”) is also juxtaposed with the reality of Guangdong’s manufacturing economy and its Special Economic Zones, which are of course the two opposing facets of globalization: deeply interrelated, yet kept as separate as possible. This separation is not only divisive but untenable; factories cannot continue to build products for which there is no market indefinitely, and the sweatshop conditions of factory employment conspire to deprive the area of a middle class capable of filling the South China Mall with the upwardly mobile customers it so desperately needs. As the global recession continues apace, one can only imagine what straits the mall, its 2009 rebranding as the “New” South China Mall carrying more than a whiff of desperation about it, finds itself in today.

As goes the mall, so does the world, particularly in the age of globalization. While it seems likely right now that capitalism in its cyclical nature will once again somehow bounce back, the current economic crisis serves as a timely reminder that, as a political-economic system and in spite of post-Cold War rhetoric, it is far from utopian. Utopia’s fourth movement, “Requiem for the 20th Century”, then, surveys this landscape from both the unrealized utopias of the past and the delayed millenarianism of our present moment; in so doing, it runs up against the same problematic that has troubled progressive intellectuals since at least the failed global student movements of 1968, if not Thomas More: How do you aim for (or even define) progress, when the goal itself is obviously unattainable? Green’s response is somber, realistic, and not to be spoiled here, as the film (actually a Keynote presentation accompanied by live narration from Green and others) really ought to be seen. Instead, perhaps now is the time to return to Adorno’s oft-misinterpreted statement; as Rothberg also points out, Adorno returned to and qualified this statement a number of times, writing for example in an essay, “Commitment”, “that literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism.”

In a sense then, Adorno’s statment is not a moratorium, but a challenge to the entirety of the humanistic enterprise in the face of unbelievable odds. In intellectual terms, the 20th century is notorious, both in Adorno’s work and more generally, as being the graveyard of the Enlightenment, the death spasm of the rational argument on the altar of all-too-human foibles like greed, power and tribal identification. Yet standing here, now, knowing this, we can no more give up hope than we can abandon reason, and this is the challenge which is put to not only poetry but all art, politics, and, ultimately, history itself. Or, in the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Whether utopia may be a goal or an unending journey, however, Green’s Utopia is undoubtedly one step in the right direction.