Anarchist Film and Video Edited by Richard Porton
‘The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.’ — Jean-Luc Goddard
‘What is Cinema? We might as well ask "What is life?", for film, like life, is made of moments; moments in time, held aloft for our perusal, imprinted on our soul, and then brought back to us from time to time as a memory -- by an event, a vision, a sound, an emotion. The separation becomes trivial -- cinema is life, and life cinema: around us, beside us, inside us. The cinema, then, is not to be consumed with haste; films are not to be digested simply as they unfold, like some plastic-wraped fast-food. Created by light and celluloid, they live only in our minds and in our hearts, savoured both during and after the fact. Projected onto the screen and into our consciousness, where they are replayed over and over -- continually re-discovered artefacts which are constantly changing us. What, then, can we say is truly real? A memory? An event? A celluloid image? The answer lies in the cinema. All is real. Nothing is impossible.’ — Glen Norton
ANARCHIST FILM AND VIDEO Copyright © the authors First published in the USA and UK in 2009 by PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 ISBN: 978-1-60486-050-4 and ChristieBooks PO Box 35 Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 1ZS ISBN-13: 978-1-873976-35-7 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. Printed by Short Run Press, Exeter Distributed in the UK by: Central Books 99 Wallis Road London E9 5LN Email:
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CONTENTS Introduction
1
Richard Porton About the authors
i 1vii
PART ONE: The past (on cinema —or anarchism —in the early years of the 20th century.) 1 Eric Jarry The Cinema du Peuple Cooperative Venture 2 Armand Guerra A Note on the UCEE Cooperative 3 Isabelle Marinone Educational Cinema 4 Emeterio Diez Anarchist Cinema during the Spanish Civil War
xii 41 1 45 9 95 15 107 33
5 Andrew H. Lee
125
Libertarias
99
6 Dan Georgiakas Alexander the Great
PART TWO: The present (focusing on new media) 7 Pietro Ferrua Anarchist Film Festivals 8 Russell Campbell System Overload 9 Richard Modiano Cop Watch L.A. 10 Andrew Hedden Videotaping a New World
143 109
xii 189 121 201 129 229 141 265 147
INTRODUCTION
Richard Porton
Attempting to sum up the relationship between film and anarchism is as challenging as pinpointing the affinities between painters, musicians, novelists, poets, playwrights, and the anti-authoritarian tradition. If we speak of “anarchist cinema,” are we referring to films about the historical experience of anarchists and anarchism or films with an anarchist impetus that might have been made by non-anarchists? Just as anarchist motifs permeate the work of both the realist painter Gustave Courbet and the moder