As the American president continues to treat the world like a dimwitted 12-year-old might his chemistry set, who can fault the cynic's thinking that any kind of radical transformation is inconceivable? Yet as Howard Zinn shows in his landmark A People's History of the United States, regular joes from the immigrant masses have shaped American history by fighting back against empowered elites. But the actions of minority radicals have also, too often, caused their own demise. A loose adaptation of Zinn's work, John Gianvito's remarkable film is a radical act in its own right, a calm, patient and beautiful testament to the fallen.

Consisting of elegantly composed shots of grave sites and public shrines, and progressing through American history from colonial times to the present, Profit motive is a monument to monuments, and a call to arms. The resting places of such famed figures as Malcolm X, Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez and Eugene V. Debs stand alongside some unfamiliar, but just as important radicals, and markers of crucial strikes, protests and massacres. Gianvito punctuates these scenes with glorious Straubian landscapes of the wind blowing through trees, exemplifying the spirits of the nation's earliest massacred residents. And then there's the end, when what's been left unsaid erupts to the surface. All told, Profit motive is a singular, never-dull experience, one that presents a forceful argument suggesting that however many Bergmans and Antonionis may pass, cinema will persist.

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