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March 23, 2006

Film and the Anarchist Imagination

Richard Porton; Born in Flames; & V for Vendetta

By Andrew

The history of anarchism is, alas, still hidden. With the recent passing of actress Maureen Stapleton, obituaries far and wide rarely failed to mention her 1981 Academy Award for playing the famous anarchist Emma Goldman in Reds. As a reference to anarchism and its history in mainstream outlets, it was all too typical: cursory, fleeting, and undefined. Its not that odes to Stapleton needed explanations of anarchy; only that anarchism never gets the serious consideration it deserves.

The recent V for Vendetta is another case in point. Based as it is off a brilliant anarchist graphic novel, you might say it gives anarchism a certain consideration, but it is hardly a serious one. Village Voice reviewer J. Hoberman, for instance, mistakenly attributes the film's terrorism to anarchists, but its intellectual aspirations to neo-Marxists Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. It's not exactly Hoberman's fault: the intellectual debts to anarchism were scrubbed from V, as they have been scrubbed from history in general.

For the above reasons, Hoberman — and all of us - would do well to read Richard Porton's critical study Film and the Anarchist Imagination (New York and London: Verso, 1999). It bears repeating — and has born repeating, unfortunately, for over a hundred years now — that anarchy is not "chaos." Porton's work repeats this truism, serving as an accessible introduction for any unfamiliar with the history, theory, or practice of anarchism, and he manages to do so in a novel way: through the lens of cinema. The book is less accessible for someone unfamiliar with film studies — I had to constantly supplement it with a good dictionary — but still, it achieves a rarity: it takes anarchism seriously.

Imagining Anarchists - Film and the Anarchist Imagination by Richard Porton

Porton opens with a most appropriate quote from Victor Serge: "shot through with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and subdivisions, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between words and deeds" (1). The most spineless go running from these contradictions (Serge, a Bolshevik, included). But the best anarchists thrive off their tensions — and Porton, though never identifying his political loyalties, is thankfully among them, at least in spirit. As working class self-activity; as a critique of State socialism; as sexual politics; as avant-garde art; as pedagogy; anarchism brings questions of how to, in Porton's words, "reconcile the seemingly conflicting claims of individual autonomy and collective struggle." (3) Porton's task is to document how particular films, both officially and unofficially tied to anarchism, achieve anarchist goals.

It is a task he more than accomplishes, discussing what seems like hundreds of films throughout history. Of course, anarchism having been lampooned and misunderstood as all hell, Porton recognizes that "the task of dealing with films whose vision of anarchism is often laughably unsubtle becomes unavoidable" (11). From one of the first stories put on celluloid — a recreation of the execution arguably-anarchist assassin Leon Czolgosz in 1901 — to more concerted efforts by the likes of Hal Hartley (e.g. Simple Men [1992]), Porton documents how "most filmmakers proffer de-historicized agendas that have little to do with historical reality." (13) These portrayals of anarchists give us the "irrational violent renegades" (11) that still haunt the collective imagination today; as well as the quaint, cuddly dreamers, which society tolerates, but whose place of residence is commonly understood to be Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Porton offers evidence that suggests the real simpletons are not the anarchists, but those without the courage to do anarchist ideas justice.

Porton does not linger on the sins of those who seek to taint anarchy's good name. Indeed, he saves some of his best and most heartfelt criticism for well-meaning, but ultimately simplistic films with an anarchistic agenda. These include documentaries like The Wobblies [1979] and Anarchism in America [1981], as well as dramas like Sacco and Vanzetti [1971] and Land and Freedom [1995]. In reference to Land and Freedom, Porton notes "their story is tethered to a thesis that much to often holds an admirable political stance hostage to a wooden dramaturgy" (85). In other words, often times, political films lose themselves in their hurry to evoke an emotion or convey a message. Instead of asking anarchism's tough questions — questions, for instance, about individual responsibility, about the indivisibility of theory and practice and the ability to create new futures — films will often rush to clean things up in sake of resolving the plot.

An Anarchist Plot — Born in Flames

Porton saves the most love for films that are "polyphonic," meaning they contain more than one perspective. These films inevitably leave the tough questions open for the audience to answer for themselves. He discusses many of these pictures, many of which seem terribly hard to get a hold of. One that I have actually seen, and love to the point that I'm not afraid to say its my favorite film — "For political reasons," I always rush to assure my friends. I'm talking about Lizzie Bordon's Born in Flames [1983].

Never mind that it was released the year I was born — its relevance to today is one of the most striking things about it. It's set ten years after a socialist revolution in America, and while the labor movement is apparently in power, women and people of color are — surprise, surprise — still treated like shit. Born in Flames follows the lives of many different women — black, white, lesbian, working class, middle class, artist, bureaucrat, young, old — as they struggle to live under the staid politics of a Socialist state, and as they frequently discuss issues of tactics and strategy, particularly the effectiveness of violence.

I suppose some folks would find the film boring; I find it exhilarating. No other film that I know mixes issues of anti-racism, anti-hierarchical organizing, armed struggle, anti-sexism, working class and queer politics, State repression, internationalism, and media (both corporate and alternative), etc. so seamlessly. And it doesn't hurt that the soundtrack kicks ass — the theme song will be stuck in your head for days, and you'll love it ("Borrrrrrrrrn in Flaaaa-ames…. Bornnnn in Flaaa-ames…"). Some might also find the film's pace and inability to resolve a lot of issues exhausting, but the film is more than aware of its inability to resolve everything it is presenting. How else to explain its explosive finale?

Anarchy In Action? — V for Vendetta

It's funny. Take out the anti-racism, the anti-sexism, the working class politics, and all but a scene or two of the queer politics, change the government from Socialist to Fascist, and essentially what you've got is V for Vendetta: a story of armed struggle set in the near future against a oppressive State. The very real questions discussed by the women in Born in Flames are also mostly present in V for Vendetta, particularly the question of violence. As the real-life Black feminist Flo Kennedy explains — in what is perhaps Flames's most memorable line — "The right to violence is like the right to pee: you've gotta have the right place and the right time."

Yet while the original graphic novel of V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore, is bursting with anarchist imagination, the film is lacking in both anarchism and imagination. As Moore explained in an interview, the script that purports to bring his story to the screen fully extinguishes the questions he had hoped to raise. It deserves to be quoted at length.

"I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it. They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys… At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution."

Alas, the film seems more concerned with properly action movie solutions, not anarchist solutions. Nor is there little to any trace of an artistic solution - V the Film is haphazardly paced, and the acting is atrocious and full of archetypes (with the exception of Hugo Weaving as V), not to mention the cinematography and set design. Which is a shame, because only a brief glance at the graphic novel elicits beautiful images that are just begging to be translated onto screen.

Adapted for the screen by Andy and Larry Wachowski (The Matrix Bros.), V the Film essentially proves what the Matrix forcefully suggested: you can't convey ideas with an action film. For many critics, it seems these ideas are the film's saving grace; but that is only true because the brilliance of the graphic novel is struggling within the constraints of the action film genre.

Nothing Short of Perfection

Moore's graphic novel is not perfect, of course; the female characters, while developed much, much more strongly than in the film, are still defined primarily by their relationships with men. Even Evey, the story's heroine, is very much tied to the figure of V. Porton, for his part, has a fairly good eye for feminism, but his work reflects anarchism's very Western biases in its relative lack of attention to struggles against racism and colonialism (which isn't due to a lack of examples). Aside from an Argentinean film, Rebellion in Patagonia [1974], no other non-Western film is discussed. And although Porton has a good focus on the limits of intellectuals and artists, his esoteric language sometimes defeats the purpose of these discussions.

But perfection is not what art or politics is about; nor does perfection define anarchism. Indeed, anarchism sometimes seems to rebuffs any attempt at definition. Porton concludes his work, "it is exceedingly difficult to say authoritatively what anarchist plots, images, and forms are or should be: they are constantly in flux and subject to revision." (253) As they should be, I hasten to add. If power really is the ability to define the world and make it act in a desired manner, anarchism is then the struggle for power for all to determine for themselves the world they wish to live in. This is the anarchist imagination, and it necessitates dialogues and debates. Sometimes, as Born in Flames and V for Vendetta (the graphic novel) demonstrate, opening these dialogues and debates requires a great amount of risk and struggle. And I think this is what it means to take anarchism seriously.

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