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78 / Neel’s Social Realist Artsistent support for her social realist art. The two met in 1940, and her early portraitdepicts a handsome, if tense, individual (Sam, 1940, ƒg. 57). The very imageof an intellectual, he holds one hand poised above the other as if to hold anidea in his mind.A founder of the Worker’s Film and Photo League (a section of the Worker’sInternational Relief, sponsored by the Communist International) in the winterof 1930–1931, Brody had been a ƒlm critic for the New Theatre Magazine, ExperimentalCinema, Filmfront, and the Daily Worker. He was the most knowledgeablewriter in America in the 1930s about the Russian revolutionary ƒlmmakersEisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovjenko, and was the ƒrst to translate theParis lectures of Dziga Vertov into English in the January 1935 Filmfront 2and 3. Consciously emulating Vertov’s concept of the Kino-Eye, which he ƒrstencountered in Henri Barbusse’s publication Le Monde in Paris in 1921–1922, Brody described WFPL’s ƒlms as “reality recorded on ƒlm strips and . . .built up into wholes embodying our revolutionary interpretation of events.” 47With Leo Seltzer, Lester Balog, Robert Del Duca, and others, he made amongthe earliest social documentary ƒlms of the Depression, including hunger1932: The National Hunger March to Washington (1932–1933), Bonus March(1932), and America Today (1933). 48 Unlike Social Realist painting, theseƒlms were shown in union halls where they could reach the working class directly.According to Brody, “The Workers Film and Photo League carried onthe struggle on two fronts: (1) by making ƒlms aimed to bring to proletarianmessage of class stuggle to the working class audiences and (2) to expose andcombat the Hollywood lies that ƒll the American screens.” 49By the time Neel met Brody he was no longer the active and innovativeartist he had been. Nonetheless, his beliefs had not changed. Even as late ashis Jump Cut interview in 1977, Brody confessed that as a member of the SocialistMedia Group in Santa Monica he was “still trying.” 50 Throughout hiscareer as a critic and ƒlmmaker, his approach to art paralleled Neel’s: “I amnot a disinterested art-for-art’s saker. The most ‘escapist’ art is, by that very fact,sterile at best and reactionary at worst . . . What is art if it is not to ‘engage’ . . .and ‘enrage’ too.” 51 In 1946, well after the dissolution of the League, Brodyfounded Horizon Films “to combat the alarming increase in racial and religioustension in our country—using the double barreled weapon of truth and16mm ƒlm.” 52 Like all of Neel’s “proletarian” portraits from these years, hermany portraits of Sam from the 1940s and 1950s relate the left-wing “hero” tohis era. The sensitive intellectual from 1940 becomes by 1958 (ƒg. 58) the stillhandsome, ever resolute proletarian with a black t-shirt and crossed arms, defensively“wearing his politics on his sleeve.”In contrast, Neel’s portrait of another of her intellectual mentors, Mike