Customer Reviews

Film and the Anarchist Imagination

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Richard Porton has succeeded in doing what few other authors have done in the past. He has written an accessible, clearminded assessment of anarchist philosophy and its effect on film, both in the medium's historical and contemporary manifestations. The range of his discussion includes the depiction of anarchists in film, the use of cinematic techniques to exemplify anarchist ideas, the history of anarchist movements and their effect on cinema, and the problems attending any consideration of anarchism within the medium of film. Without any blatant prosyletizing, Porton makes a case for the validity of anarchist philosophies and knowledgably leads the reader through all the ideas, arguments, prejudices, and mistaken assumptions that have surrounded anarchism since its inception in the 19th century. He accurately portrays the diversity of anarchist thought from libertarianism to anarcho-communism to punk mayhem, while securely linking that diversity to a wealth of 20th-century films. His book is a must-read for everyone who has any interest in anarchist ideologies, film history and criticism, and cultural studies.

This book provides a very good overview of its' subject, covering both anarchist and anarchist-associated filmmakers (like Bunuel and Vigo) as well as films that deal with anarchism, like Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy. The book is scholarly, so people looking for an easy read should look elsewhere. But I believe that it will come to be seen as the definitive work on this topic for a long time to come.

This book is at that same time quite good, and also disappointing. Good in the sense that it covers a lot of material, particularly in regards to older films, which I haven't come across. So now I have a quite substantial list of interesting films to track down and watch (for instance the first one I looked for is Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberte, which I had not heard of before, but is a brilliant comedy-operetta about work refusal, factories, etc). Porton makes a number of interesting points about particular films, aesthetics, politics and their conjunction. The main letdown is the book is not really about the anarchist imagination per se, as much as the role that anarchists have played in the popular imagination as embodied in the form of film. Not surprisingly in societies hostile to anarchist thought this often comes across as clichéd, reductive, and silly portrayals of anarchism and anarchists. Bearded bombe throwers and the like (although I suppose now that is being replaced by the image of the black pajama block). This is not so surprising, although I suppose in am academic context since I think that Porton is the first to write about such that makes it a good contribution to knowledge. What would strike me as more interesting would be to explore the relation between anarchist approaches to representation, aesthetics and knowledge as they operate within film, and whether the form is conducive to the fostering of anarchistic imaginaries and relations. In other words to take anarchism as an approach rather than an object of study, which is what I thought the book would be trying to do given the title. Porton does this somewhat and draws out some interesting tensions and questions at places, for instance in discussion of pro-work / anti-work tensions within different strains of anarchist thought (although I'd wish he would have done this more often). So overall it's quite a good book, although I kept wishing that those moments would occur more frequently, that it would be a work anarchist imagination rather than on the imagination constructed of anarchism.

Try picking any page in this book and reading it straight through. You won't be able to. The intellectual gobbledy-gook is as thick and impenetrable as a briar patch. Portman also mentions way too many movies in passing with absolutely no connection to anything. He just seems to be name-dropping. Not only that but he leaves out major anarchist-related movies, such as "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" written by the anarchist writer B. Traven. Avoid at all costs unless you like reading college theses.