Magazine: Cineaste, 1999
ANARCHISTS ON FILM: FROM MAD BOMBERS TO SECULAR SAINTS
------------------------------------------------------
Bearded bomb-throwers! Self-indulgent nihilists! Dangerous subversives!
In this excerpt from Film and the Anarchist Imagination (to be published by Verso in April), author Richard Porton dissects the cinematic stereotypes of anarchism and discusses other films featuring anarchist characters and motifs.
Conservatives, liberals, and mainstream socialists alike have long either heaped calumny upon the anarchist movement or damned it with faint praise. From "early cinema" to the supposedly more sophisticated present, the demonization of anarchist protagonists is evident in films made by both commercial hacks and auteurs with rarefied sensibilities. Mikhail Bakunin's contention that anarchism promotes "the absolutely free and spontaneous organization of economic and social solidarity as completely as possible between all human beings on the earth" continues to be strenuously ignored. The goal of a nonhierarchical society, unfettered by the constraints of the State, always united, despite often fierce internecine squabbles, collectivist anarchists such as Bakunin, anarcho-communist adherents of Peter Kropotkin, and anarcho-syndicalists who maintain that the "emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the workers themselves." Nevertheless, as Marcus Graham observed fifty years ago, "according to the picture painted by the intellectual hirelings of capitalism, the philosophy of anarchism" is reducible to "assassination, bomb throwing and violence"(n1)
Films have often invoked the prototypical bearded, and usually foreign-born, anarchist terrorist as the quintessential agent of chaos. Yet the fascination of the many cinematic depictions of anarchist protagonists, as well as films merely peppered with brief but suggestive allusions to anarchism, lies with their ability to offer a fun-house mirror reflection of common political and social anxieties. A bomb inadvertently lobbed into Buster Keaton's buggy in Cops (1922) by a black-clad, hirsute anarchist is paradoxically double-edged--the film participates in the usual demonization of anarchist terrorism while allowing the resourceful Buster to unwittingly disturb the peace at a parade attended by throngs of policemen and stuffy dignitaries. Similarly, the eponymous press magnate in Citizen Kane (1941) can think of no more heinous epithet to smear a man suspected of murder with than "anarchist," even though the audience is simultaneously aware that Kane's own unscrupulousness nullifies his ability to make reasoned political judgments. As in many films, the odiousness of the accuser exceeds the sting of the accusation.
This sort of double vision is particularly observable in allegorical films that either deal with or were produced during periods of political repression. In Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe (Land in Anguish, 1967), for example, the condemnation of the protagonist, Paulo Martins, as an "anarchist" by his enemies is more an indictment of the tortured hero's neofascist and reactionary populist adversaries--and former allies--than of anarchism itself. In a parallel vein, during the transitional Soviet cinema of the glasnost years, the authoritarianism of state socialism began to be undermined by some influential directors. This is especially true of Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance (1986), a film in which Varlam Aravidze, the dictatorial mayor and thinly-disguised Stalin surrogate, attacks an artist named Baratoli as an "anarchist" whose work is a "shameful blot" on Soviet culture; in this context," anarchism" comes to epitomize the full range of esthetic and political options that Stalinism sought to obliterate. In a much less focused manner, the decision of an impulsive elderly bank robber named Jose to christen himself an anarchist in Marcelo Pineyro's Caballos Salvajes (Wild Horses, 1995) is an implicit rebuke to the murderous repression suffered by many Argentinean citizens during the reign of the military junta. At times, what seems to be a flippant reference to anarchism has more far-reaching implications. The kindly father in Clarence Brown's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness (1935) who playfully taunts his mildly rebellious son with the label of anarchist serves as a subtle reminder of the fact that the playwright was on intimate terms with prominent anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Hippolyte Havel. O'Neill's familiarity with anarchism, humorously submerged in Ah, Wilderness, is conspicuous in The Iceman Cometh (1940), as well as John Frankenheimer's faithful cinematic adaptation (1973): the melancholy Larry Slade was closely modeled on the individualist anarchist Terry Carlin and the agitated bohemian, Hugo Kalmar, is a rather nasty caricature of Hippolyte Havel.
Propaganda by the deed, Paul Brousse and Errico Malatesta's late nineteenth-century injunction to match incendiary rhetoric with concrete acts designed to topple the established order, became a contentious issue among anarchists during the era of the First International. But for many filmmakers, propaganda by the deed was nothing but a justification of random acts of terror. Vittorio and Paolo Taviani's San Michele aveva un gallo (St. Michael Had a Rooster, 1971) is the rare film that treats these controversies with any subtlety. Released at a time when extraparliamentary violence made the Italian extreme left a pariah among Communists as well as conservatives and liberal parliamentarians, the Tavianis' film examines the literal--and psychological--isolation of a nineteenth-century "Internationalist," Giulio Manieri, who gradually realizes that his endorsement of propaganda by the deed has not led to a large-scale peasant revolution. Much of the film details Manieri's ten years in prison, but the hapless altruist is even more alone when he finally emerges from his cell to learn that his former comrades now believe that a romantic faith in revolutionary violence is wrongheaded and self-defeating.
A much more common cinematic propensity to portray anarchists as wily knaves or mere lunatics is evident in silent films such as Edwin S. Porter's straightforward dramatic reenactment, Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901) and D.W. Griffith's The Voice of the Violin (1909). Leon Czolgosz, whose electrocution is commemorated in Porter's film, assassinated President McKinley in 1901 during the head of state's visit to Buffalo. Czologsz is what journalists delight in calling a self-proclaimed anarchist; his knowledge of anarchism seemed limited and it is purported that he might have shot McKinley to prove to the anarchist community he was not a police spy. The film's last shot, with its graphic depiction of Czologsz's death agonies, did not merely fulfill an eager public's communal sadism as they witnessed Porter's restaging of a public execution. This early docudrama commemorates, with gruesome cinematic flair, the killing of a man who inspired a wave of antianarchist vigilantism; Porter's film is a macabre entombment of this phase of America's ongoing antiradical bloodlust.
