BY JOSEPH HANSEN  
Several times I have heard of plans to make a film of the life of Trotsky or at least of his final years in Mexico. One attempt was made at a television show on the assassination. It was a miserable business, more slanderous than truthful. A Hollywood entrepreneur that I know of even spent time in Mexico studying the locale and gathering material. In three cases, I have been asked to provide information to help lend verisimilitude to productions that were planned. Two of them fell through and the third may suffer the same fate—which, perhaps, is not altogether to be deplored. The producers began with their own preconceived notions as to what constitutes dramatic material and how Trotsky might be bent into these notions. None of them had much interest in portraying Trotsky’s real inner drives or his central commitment and goal in life. The audience they had in mind might not accept this as a good evening’s entertainment.

To make a truthful film of Trotsky requires taking him as a political figure but not the kind characteristic of the bourgeois world of today. He was of a different kind—committed, like a great artist, to presenting a faithful reflection of his times, or, more accurately, a scientist who has become convinced that the main problem facing mankind is to change the framework of our times, to end the long agonized epoch of warring classes and to replace it with a society built on the foundation of a rationally planned economy. He could also be pictured truthfully as a tribune and fighter preoccupied with constructing the organization required to win socialism on a world scale.

To make a film of Trotsky in which all this is cast aside is like presenting Pierre and Marie Curie without their drive to discover the secret of radioactivity or the drudgery of fractionating huge amounts of pitchblende in order to isolate the mysterious substances, polonium and radium; or a “drama” of Louis Pasteur without his passionate interest in bacteriology and the painstaking laboratory work he engaged in against the advice of well-meaning friends who sought to persuade him not to waste his valuable time on chimerical and insoluble problems….

Trotsky, who was well acquainted with Freud’s work, understood himself very well. In many places he has made perfectly clear how thoroughly he was guided by fully conscious aims; and he has specified what they were.

In the foreword to My Life he tells us that “except for the years of the civil war,” the “main content of my life…has been party and literary activity.” Almost “a third of a century of my conscious life was entirely filled with revolutionary struggle. And if I had to live it over again, I would unhesitatingly take the same path.

For the eleven years remaining to him after he wrote My Life, Trotsky continued to do what he had done in the previous three decades. His order of priorities was not the same as that of so many intellectuals who came to admire his genius. They put in first place his best known books, Literature and Revolution, The History of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed, Stalin—An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. They rated as next in the list the mass of articles, pamphlets, booklets—on German fascism, on the Spanish revolution, on the deepening crisis in France, on the whole turbulent course of events as the world moved towards its second global war.

Few of them were attracted by the contributions Trotsky made in the internal discussions of the Fourth International. This is understandable, for these writings can be fully appreciated only by cadres with a considerable Marxist background. As for Trotsky's “party” activities, particularly in the final eleven-year period, the intellectuals at best have simply not been interested.

Trotsky himself, however, took a different attitude. In the journal which he kept for a time in France and Norway, he jotted the following very revealing thoughts in his March 25, 1933, entry: “For a long time now I have not been able to satisfy my need to exchange ideas and discuss problems with someone else. I am reduced to carrying on a dialogue with the newspapers, or rather through the newspapers with facts and opinions. And still I think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life—more important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any other.”  
 
 
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