Article

REVIEW

FILM AND THE ANARCHIST IMAGINATION

AUTHOR:RICHARD PORTON
PUBLISHER:VERSO
314pp £13.00 paperback

Richard PortonÕs book is intended as Òan authoritative, alternative account of films featuring anarchist characters and motives . Ò As such, it has much to recommend it r but r interesting and provocative though it is, it does not succeed entirely. Porton Ôs attitude to anarchism is refreshing. He defends the anarchist record of Òworking class self activityÓ and reports approvingly Victor Serge Ôs comment (from Memoirs of a Revolutionary) that ÒAnarchism swept us away completely because it demanded everything of us and offered everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it failed to illumine. Ò The opening chapters of the book detail the stereotypes of anarchists which Òpermeate both Hollywood fluff and European art cinema . Ò He launches a stout and often amusing defence of the anarchist left,against the notion that anarchism is reducible to 11 assassination, bomb throwing and violence.Ò Porton notes Robert BakerÕs film The Siege of Sidney Street (1960) as typical, being a fictionalisation of the 1911 shoot out between emigre bank robbers (almost certainly not anarchists at all,as he rightly notes) and the police .Peter the Painter r the gangÕ s leader r Òplayed with sinister relish by Peter Wyngarde, combines the dissolute bohemianism and impulsive violence that constitute the classic stereotype of the wild anarchist.Ó

Sadly, as Porton observes, attempts by those sympathetic to the anarchist cause to rebut the stereotype have too often countered the negative representation with a gutted version of the politics they would~ claim to defend.Joel Sucher and Steven FischlerÕs documentary Anarchism in America (1981) is one such case.The film compares anarchism to a rugged (and often reactionary individualism, a Ò twentie th century AmericanismÓ as the author notes .Bo Widerberg Ôs Joe Hill (1971) provides a further example .Porton observes that the film creates Òa sentimentalized Joe Hill who is more archetypal folk hero than anarchist or libertarian Marxist (and) avoids the more anarchistic components of HillÕs life while emphasizing his status as a folksy balladeer.Ó Lizzie BordenÕs 1983 film Born In Flames is preferred as an alternative,for its defence of revolutionary violence and its Òdisdain for social democracyÓ.Porton recommends its Òemphasis on alternative media as a locus of insurrectionary discontentÓ and claims that ÒBordenÕs inventive cinematic style is matched by her resourceful appropriation of important anti authoritarian currents.Ó As someone who thought Ò Born In .Flames Ò an entirely flawed work(because it reduced its politics to charicature, and,with its focus on affinity groups and an anarcho-feminist Womens Army Òset in a not too distant futureÓ,fudged the issue of how to portray an insurrectionary politics relevant to the here-and -now) I canÕt share PortonÕs enthusiasm, nor do I share his belief that Ken LeachÕs 1995 Land and Freedom fails ultimately because it Òmuch too often holds an admirable political stance hostage to wooden dramaturgy. Ò Porton claims that ÒThroughout the film, a tenuous attempt can be discerned to contrast the current climate of political despair with the 1930s arduous, if more optimistic, ideological battles.Ó But it is precisely this attempt to centre the politics of the film, to provide a context for an audience coming to the debates around the Spanish Civil War for the first time, that sets Land and Freedom apart from works like Born In Flames or Jean Luc GodardÕs Tout va Bien.Porton refers to Godard Ôs Òanguished reflexivityÓ but Tout Va Bien oozes pseudo radical complacency, so assured of its formal radicalism that it takes form as an end in itself. And thereÕs the rub.Are the only alternatives the Òleft nostalgiaÓ which Porton rightly dismisses in Joe Hill and Anarchism in America,or the experiments with form of Tout Va Bien and,another Porton recommendation ,Brownlow and MolloÕs Winstanley (1975)? Porton notes favourably the Bakhtinian concept of the work of art as a Òcacophony of voicesÓ,as a possible means of undermining the notion of authorial supremacy and moving towards a collaborative r collectivi st approach to f ilm r but the examples he cites betray only the pretence of such cacophony. Leach at least,made genuine efforts to include a multiplicity of real voices in his film.Land and Freedom includes a sequence where villagers debate the merits of agrarian collectivisation. Porton quotes Lisa Berger,a researcher on the film, who was responsible for finding Òpeople who could argue for collectivisation... others who could be opposed r and others who could see the point,but weren Ô t really convinced, based on real, lived experience working in the countryside. Ò If Land and Freedom tries to give voice to lived experience in its fictions, Tout Va Bien surely does the opposite-attempts to obscure the authorial voice (Godard Ôs) and pass it off as authentic working class experience.

At the root of this is the question of aesthetics.Porton makes this hard to address,by never defining his own political groundings,and never entirely coming clean about his own views on cinema and aesthetics.He tells us that a Òmonolithic anarchist aesthetic must be dismissed as elusive and dubiously essentialistÓrand quotes sympathetically ShelleyÕ s Romantic anarchism and concern to Òchampion the resources of creative immanence.Ó Nevertheless r Proudhon,as the book details,adhered to the notion that Òa realist aesthetic represents the zenith of artistic achievmentÓ and Bakunin Òhad little time for Rimbaudian inwardness and aesthetic formulations . Ò Porton claims the Situationist International as Òprofoundly indebted to anarchism,libertarian Marxism,as we 11 as surrealismÓ, but has to concede that DebordÕs (awful) La Societe du Spectacle (1973) Òreveals how his anti-authoritarianism manifested itself in oracular pronouncements that gave this potted version of his treatise a quasi-authoritarian tenor.Ó (One might note also that DebordÕs Ò anti -authoritarianismÓ is called into question as much by the bitter personal infighting that wracked the SI r by his general boorishness and his drunken misogyny, as by his Ò art Ò, but the notion that aesthetics and practice ought, for revolutionary anarchists at least, to have some connection, appears to be one with which Porton does not wish to address)Those anarchists who have engaged with the development of an anarchist aesthetics through film criticism,like Emma Goldman(who attacked movies as the Òopium of the massesÓ)or Dwight Macdonald (a dubious anarchist-but letÕs give Porton the benefit of the doubt) who (to paraphrase Umberto Eco) believed Òavant -garde is synonymous with ÒhighÓ artÓ, appear to have retreated to the ground occupied also by the likes of Theodor Adorno ;cultural elitism disguised as a defence of modernism Porton concludes only that it is Òdifficult to say authoritatively what anarchist plots ,images and forms arelor should be:they are constantly in flux and subject to revision.Ó All well and good.It is certainly the case that an anarchist politics should seek to def end r a s Porton puts it elsewhe re r Ò the full range of aesthetic and political options that Stalinism sought to obliterate.Ó Left as it is r tfiough.this reduces the political struggles around ÒcultureÓ to a defence of the avant garde.That this leads us nowhere is clear enough from the case of Adorno.who railed against jazz and saw Beethoven and Mahler as the aesthetic guardians of the age. ÒCultureÓ is, in its essence, (whether by culture we mean fi Ims r books r music) about communication . An anarchist praxis-if ana rch i sm is to mean,as Porton infers,a commi tment to Òproletarian self emancipationÓ and not merely Romantic Òacts of total insubordinationÓ -has to consider what is communicated r by whom, to whom, and r cruc i ally r who owns the medium of communi cation. For ton passes up the opportunity to seriously engage wi th these issues when he examines, somewhat cursoril~ r the works produced by the CNT following the collectivisation of the film industry and control of exhibition and distribution. Among the works produced were Aurora de Esperenza (1937)-charting the political development of an unemployed worker r Nosotros somos Asi ! ( 1937)-an anarcho -syndicalist musical comedy r and the record of Durutti Ôs funeral , Entierro de Durutti .Porton tells us that the CNT Ôs films grew out of an Òear nestrif sometimes inept attempt to fuse radical politics with mass entertainment . Ò Inept they may possibly have been but its surely the attempt to reach a popular audience with a radical message which is the crux of whatÕs at issue here.Furtherdoes our commitment to artistic revolution preclude,as it does for MacDonald Òany attempt to mediate its resultsÓ? Porton leaves us to conclude that the only options on offer are crude populist nostalgia trips (an anarchist mirror of the arts of the Popular Front period) or the tedious elitism embodied in the Òcreative jestsÓ of Craig BaldwinÕs 1995 Sonic Outlaws .Because Porton refuses to take a position himself r the book fails to push any real debate forward,leaving us to conclude that Òanything goesÓ .He tells us that he does not propose a ÒManichean division between ÒretrogradeÓand ÒprogressiveÓ styles of film makingÓ and contends that he is Ò chiefly concerned with films that explore and promote anarchist self activityÓ-but it is here that an otherwise entertaining and well researched work falls on its face .Either there is no such thing as Òanarchist filmÓ except in the widest sense of that Òfull range of aesthetic and political optionsÓ -or there exists the possibility of using film to Òpromote anarchist self activityÓ-and the implication that there ought to be a specific anarchist praxis that engages with this possibility. In the CNT films r in the works of Leach and Jim Allen,I would contend such praxis can be glimpsed.Porton fudges on this r and the book is worse because of it.

In Ò The Condition of Pos tmode rn i t y Ò (Blackwell 1990) David Harvey considers the films Bladerunner (directed by Ridley Scott) and Wings of Desire (directed by Wim Wenders.) He notes that Ò Postmodern art forms and cultural artefacts by their very nature must self consciously embrace the problem of image creation,and necessarily turn inwards upon themselves as a result.It then becomes difficult to escape being what is being imaged within the art form itself.Ó It is clear from HarveyÕs writing that he fears that this may not be an issue simply for that which might be loosely termed the Ò postmodern . Ò What gave rise to such enthusiasm for cinema as a possibly liberating medium at an early stage was the possibilities seemingly offered by its then-new techniques-its new ways of recording motionlof cutting,of montage,of playing with perspective. The problem,as Raymond Williams once drily noted,is this:ÓWhen I was a student it was usual to say that montage and the dialectic were closely related forms of the same revolutionary movement of thought.To be sure that was before we had seen what looked like the same kind of thing done in a thousand films of every conceivable ideological emphasis.That was a period in which it was still widely supposed that the new was inevitably the radical.Ó(Cinema and Socialism in Politics of Modernity.Verso) The newr then r is not enou3h.As Williams notes r wi th film,we can see how Òthis new and at first marginal capitalism was,both to develop and to exploit,a genuinely popular medium.Ó (ibid)Breaking ground within medium immersed in the logic of capital is only to take part in the production of the next new thing . An anarchist i nte rvention into cinema then, must surely address this. Harvey contends that the techniques of cinema are such that the very notion of a revolutionary cinema may be unrealiseable; ÒCinema is after all, the supreme maker and manipulator of images for commercial purposes,and the very act of using it well always entails reducing the complex stories of daily life to a sequence of images upon a depthless screen." The way out of this is perhaps to move away from what Harvey identifies as the "condition in which aesthetics premominates over ethics."

We are back, then, to the Bakhtinian "cacophony of voices." If the best a revolutionary cinema can achieve is to end the predominance ofÓaesthetics over ethicsÓ in film making then the key to an anarchist praxis might be simply in seeking to allow those normally unheard to speak.Williams talks of a return to cinematic naturalism as one way of doing this; ÒFor the central socialist case,in all matters of cultureris that the lives of the great majority of people have been and still are almost wholly disregarded by most arts.It can be important to contest these selective arts within their own terms r but our central commitment ought always to be those areas of hitherto silent or fragmented or positively misrepresented experience.Ó In Ken LeachÕs work with Jim Alien r in the works of Alan Clark, in the best work of John Sayles (ÒBaby ItÕs You Ò for instance) we can begin to see what such a cinema might look like.

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers worked with the New York Newsreel group in 1970 to produce a film about their politics and their interventions in Detroit;ÓFinally Got the News . Ò Fusing a montage history of American labour with Detroit music and League leaders talking straight to camera,its probably the best contemporary example of a revolutionary group succesfully combining Òaesthetics and ethicsÓ in that it allows the politics of the group to be forefront without swamping the film as ÒfilmÓ. Echoes of ÒFinally Got the News Ò can be seen in Paul SchraderÕs 1977 film Blue Collar, which Schrader calls an exercise in the Òpolitics of resentment.Ó ÒFinally Got The NewsÓ gets barely a ment ion in Porton Ô s book r but his fascination with Ò creative jestsÓ gives us pages on Guy Debord and Craig Baldwin.

ÒFilm and the Anarchist ImaginationÓ should be read. It is, as it intends, the first comprehensive survey of anarchism in film. Porton defends ably the anarchist legacy against the distortions of its cinematic portrayals. As a writer, he is lively and informative -and his love of film and his genuine desire to retrieve a lost history of radical film-making leap from the page . Porton argues that ÒIn recent years, certain scholars seem to believe that anarchism is a sub-variety of post modernism, thereby ignoring more than a hundred years of labor agitation and revolutionary struggles. Film and the Anarchist Imagination endeavours to demonstrate how these struggles have been both celebrated and derided by a diverse group of filmmakers.Ó In this he succeeds,and we should be grateful for that.

NB Something strange has happened to some of the non-alpha-numeric characters in this article - I'll go through it and replace - it's on my todo list. Webed.