Cine y anarquismo: La utopía anarquista en imágenes

by Richard Porton

El libro de Richard Porton es un estudio pormenorizado de la relación que el autor ha querido interpretar entre la historia del anarquismo - basándose en hechos históricos y en obras de diferentes autores - y las diferentes representaciones cinematográficas que ha conocido.
En el libro se amplía la definición de cine anarquista, no solamente mencionando obras producidas por anarquistas, sino también obras cinematográficas que hayan reproducido en algún fragmento acciones vinculadas al anarquismo, y es en ésta última lectura donde el libro se regocija mas extensamente.

Genres: Politics, Film, Art, History, Theory, Anarchism

284 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 1999

Reviews

[Asa]

It’s the rare case of a book about anarchism written by someone who knows the tradition’s own arguments rather than the caricature.

Porton’s first target is not the anti-anarchist film but the sympathetic one. He takes apart the cinematic anarchist-as-bomber, then takes apart the romantic anarchist-as-free-spirit with equal force, and both critiques run on the tradition’s own distinctions. Individualist against communist anarchism, propaganda of the deed against syndicalism. Vigo, Buñuel, Ken Loach, Land and Freedom, Godard: the films he likes get the sharper treatment.

Porton doesn’t need a hostile witness because he can use the tradition’s internal record.

The corpus is almost entirely European and American art cinema. The frame is anarchism in film and the excluded result, what anarchist practice looks like in cinema outside that canon, or in film outside the festival circuit, is never shown.

[Stevphen Shukaitis]

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.

[Direncan]

türkçe çevirisi Agora Kitaplığından çıkmış ve Osman Akınhay tarafından çevrilmiş. Orjinal dilinin nasıl olduğunu bilemiyorum ama sanırım çevirmene fazla süre tanınmamış olmalı ki metin çok da anlaşılır değil. Ayrıca son 100 sayfada kitabın geneline hakim olan yazım hatalarının 3 katına çıktığını düşünürsek bana pek özenilmeden baskıya verilmiş gibi geldi. Metinin genel problemi ise değindiği konular hakkında çok derin bir bilgi sunmadan (sanırım bildiğimizi varsayıyor) örnek filmlere geçmesi ve bu filmleri anlatması. Burada da sıkıntı filmin anlatımı 5 sayfa kadar ver tutunca kitap daha ziyade izlediğiniz filmleri özetlemekle yetinmiş oluyor. Güzel yanı ise izlemediğiniz filmlerle ilgili bir liste tutabilecek olmanız. O yüzden yönlendirme adına işe yarayabilir.

[Adrian]

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