The Wide Blue Road
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. He refers
sneeringly to the small size of their catch as "sardines."
Squarciò (Yves Montand) maneuvers 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, Squarciò
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
Squarciò 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 their father at work, sweat pouring
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. (In "Wages of Fear," Montand plays a down-and-out Frenchman in
Mexico who is paid to transport a truckload of nitroglycerine up a bumpy dirt
road to the top of a mountain, where it will be used to extinguish an
out-of-control oil-well fire.)
Pontecorvo went on to direct two masterpieces of leftwing 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," he always has had his eye on the
dialectic of selfishness transforming itself into social consciousness. In both
"Battle of Algiers" and "Burn" the transformation is
complete as the two protagonists of each film 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 Squarciò is the defiant
outsider. It is not so much that he seeks wealth; rather he is obeying an
imperative to stay above water both literally and figuratively. It is this
instinct for survival that makes him 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 that 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.
Squarciò 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. His decision to continue bombing not only would cost him their
friendship but his own life.
While "The Wide Blue Road" is primarily a film that addressed
the key 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
under the rubric "Tragedy of the Commons."
In 1968, Garrett Hardin published a paper by that name in
"Science," which was based on the 1833 work of William Foster Lloyd,
an amateur mathematician. He 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. For each additional animal, the herdsman
has an economic gain. However, each herdsman reaches the same result - ruin by
overgrazing the "free'' good.
The fishermen in "The Wide Blue Road" even try to convince
Squarciò of the need to respect the commons in the beginning of the film. 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, no matter how much he
rationalizes, that if everybody followed his own example, there would be no fish
eventually.
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 Food and Agriculture Administration (FAO), a US agency,
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 to 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 loss is serious since all of these species interact with
each other in the marine ecosystem and make natural reproduction possible.
"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. Now showing at the Film Forum in New York City, it very
well might make an appearance in video. Look for it. It is an exceptionally
powerful film.