The Internationale

About the 10th time someone warbled "arise, ye workers from your slumbers" in Peter Miller's (mercifully) short gloss on the perennial worker's anthem, "The Internationale," I was ready to take a wage cut and work overtime gratis. Ostensibly the history--to paraphrase R.E.M.--of the "finest worksong," this intermittently engaging film makes its point (an admittedly interesting one) with a repetitive hammer: written in 1871 by a Frenchman named Eugene Pottier, with music added a few years later by Pierre Degeyter, "The Internationale" has become an almost textbook example (though anachronistically so) of cultural guru Douglas Rushkoff's notion of a "media virus"--spreading across time and geography to become an almost universal signifier of the indomitable spirit of oppressed peoples uniting together against a common foe. Co-opted by the Soviet Union in 1917, the anthem became for many years associated with Communism, but would later crop up on such diverse ideological battlegrounds as the Spanish Civil War and Tiananmen Square. Interviewees, including Pete Seeger and Billy Bragg, comment on the song's staying power, while various others reminiscence about where they were when they first heard "The Internationale." But too much of the film is given over to repetitive montages of people from all over the world singing (it's like an extended Coke commercial for the socially aware). Recommended where "Political History--Popular Music" is taught, but pretty much optional elsewhere. Aud: C. (R. Pitman)