Paradoxically enough, films such as Joe Hill and Sacco and Vanzetti that chronicle the travails of anarchists pale in comparison to the less historically focused work of Luis Bunuel and Jean Vigo in which insurrectionary fervor takes precedence over bland tributes to secular saints. Bunuel believed that "in the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificient and dangerous weapon." The cinema of filmmakers like Widerberg and Montaldo, however well-intentioned, is a dull instrument that merely inverts hackneyed `negative images.'

(n1) Marcus Graham, "Anarchism, Capitalism and Marxism," Resistance, August-September 1949, p. 3.

(n2) Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 208.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Mad Bombers

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Giulio Manieri (Giulio Brogi) is an anarchist leader in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Saint Michael Had a Rooster (1971).

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Tunin (Giancarlo Giannini), a peasant anarchsit, is torn between his anarchist beliefs and his love for Tripolina (Lina Polito, right), a prostitute, in Lina Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy (1973).

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): The anarchist band in Claude Chabrol's Nada (1974) gets ready to shoot it out.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Anarchist Vic McCabe (Chris Cooke) and his sons Dennis (William Sage) and Mike (Mark Bailey) are the family at the center of Hal Hartley's absurdist thriller, Simple Men (1992).

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Joe Hill is blindfolded in preparation for his execution in Bo Widerberg's Joe Hill.

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