RICHARD PORTON:

anarchist cinema

• Saturday, FAC 21 (on UT campus), 3:30-6:00PM

It is impossible to speak of a genre known as "anarchist cinema": films that express an anti-authoritarian impetus, transgress the boundaries of genre and are as stylistically varied as Hector Olivera's naturalistic Rebellion in Patagonia and Luis Buñuel's surrealist provocation, L'age d'or. Some films which align themselves with -- or are at least sympathetic to -- the goals of the anarchist movement take up specific historical crises (e.g., Jean-Louis Comolli's La Cecilia or Vicente Aranda's Libertarias ), while others allude more subtly to historical realities while exemplifying the anarchist spirit of revolt (e.g. Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct, René Clair's A nous la liberté). Anarchist cinema, however loosely defined a concept, is expansive enough to encompass examples from mainstream narrative films, documentary cinema, and the outer fringes of the avant-garde.

The two films I've chosen for this sidebar are typically anomalous representatives of the "anarchist imagination." Nick MacDonald's The Liberal War (1972) fuses motifs from the personal essay, documentary, and utopian fiction, while Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley (1975) pays homage to a seventeenth-century proto-anarchist pamphleteer and rabble-rouser.

The Liberal War is noteworthy for offering a stripped-down alternative to more elaborate anti-Vietnam documentaries such as Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds and Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig . Narrated from the perspective of a commune located in some far off anarchist future, MacDonald's dissection of news coverage of the Vietnam War, particularly The New York Times' tepid "liberal" articles and editorials, recalls Noam Chomsky's ongoing evisceration of the mainstream American media. A riposte to the myth of Kennedy glamour, The Liberal War' sstripped-down aesthetic is an implicit response to the veneration of technology evident in both Hollywood blockbusters and the Vietnam debacle.

Although Brownlow and Mollo's Winstanley is equally far removed from the opulence of Hollywood super-productions, the film succeeds in recreating the ferment of the English Revolution of the 1640s with great verve and attention to historical detail. Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers -- one of the most radical sects to emerge from the Puritan Revolution -- railed against private property and established a short-lived communal experiment that foreshadowed Peter Kropotkin's anarcho-communist precepts. Along with the late Christopher Hill's seminal work (e.g. The World Turned Upside Down), Winstanley helped to unearth an important radical current that had been previously "hidden from history."