Catherine Gough-Brady’s Empathy with the Masses is a thoughtful and moving piece of videographic criticism which explores whether a collective protagonist (which she terms a co-operative character) can sustain narrative development and generate emotional response in audiences. Gough-Brady is interested in this question primarily as a filmmaker, so the piece combines reflections on her own work with a careful contextualisation. She takes John Grierson’s critique of a “central heroic character” as the driving force of a film as a point of departure. She also considers the question under investigation in relation to the “symphony film” tradition and contemporary documentaries that deal with “systemic issues”, such as racial discrimination or industrial processes. If early cinema registered the emergence of a collective character as a part of the advent of modernity, alongside movement, speed and a symbiotic relationship between people and machine, nowadays this collective character is embedded in the rhizomatic arrangements characteristic of the early twenty-first century, in which post-industrial processes of globalisation rely even more decisively on the presence of the ‘multitude’.

Gough-Brady productively explores the narrative and stylistic implications of the adoption of a collective protagonist: from the “linear” construction of the narrative in which no one figure can claim a decisive role (though I would characterise this tendency rather as an equally distributed narrative) to the less frequent use of close-ups, a key cinematic device mobilised to create an effect of access to a character’s subjectivity. Exploring these implications of a de-individualised protagonist, Gough-Brady introduces expert commentators, a strategy that I found slightly jarring and disruptive of the flow of the piece. In my view the way these “talking heads” are used in a format mimicking documentary represents a missed opportunity to dramatize the core aspect of her inquiry. Commentators in her piece themselves turn into a chorus of voices, which could have been used to turn their presence into a metacommentary on her research question.

I also found that there is an important historical point of reference missing in her discussion. Grierson was not alone in valorising the collective protagonist in the 1920s; this tendency was articulated far more powerfully in Russian avant-garde cinema, most prominently in the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein, with whose work Grierson was thoroughly familiar. In 1927 Grierson re-edited Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1926) for its American release, while in 1929 Grierson’s silent documentary  Drifters premiered in a double bill with the first English showing of Potemkin at the London Film Society. In fact, some film historians argue that Drifters was a stylistic blend of Moana (1926) and Potemkin.

Potemkin showcased “a mass protagonist”, an apt device to construct an image of “the time when the masses entered into history and history entered into the masses.”[i] The same device was used in other films in Eisenstein’s revolutionary tetralogy – Strike (1924), October (1927) and Old and New (1929) demonstrating convincingly that a mass protagonist can generate powerful emotional engagement with the audience. Yet, the use of a mass protagonist opens treatment of character to critique with far-reaching philosophical implications. For, as much as the collective voice has been valorized as an instrument of democracy, there is another philosophical tradition that insists on an individual perspective as the cornerstone of an ethical world-view. Giving ultimate expression to the latter, Emmanuel Levinas warns us that the irreducible singularity both of the self and of the other should be preserved, as opposed to be erased within the same, an erasure that goes by the names of inclusion, totality, or the collective “We”. For Levinas, a progressive autonomy should be heteronomous in order to prevent socio-political “reduction”, that is, domination and, ultimately, annihilation.

It seems to me, then, that a third way, distinct from both a classical Hollywood model centered on one or two clearly defined protagonists, on one hand, and a mass protagonist, on the other, needs to be acknowledged in this context: the strategy of a narrative composed of multiple story-lines driven by different protagonists, each imbued with agency and subjectivity. This model is becoming increasingly prominent nowadays, underpinning “long-form” television, which typically mobilises an “ensemble cast”; a genre of experimental storytelling that straddles television and art-house cinema such as Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon (2010); or such important recent cinematic works as Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (2014) or Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). This model of the multi-stranded, decentred narrative allows us to transcend what Gough-Brady, following Grierson, terms “yahoo” individualism without sacrificing singular view-points and depth of subjective worlds, creating complex, multi-voiced universes.