The Anarchist Cinema

James Newton

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789380033
• eBook ISBN: 9781789380057
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte general

The Anarchist Cinema examines the complex relationships that exist between anarchist theory and film. No longer hidden in obscure corners of cinematic culture, anarchy is a theme that has traversed arthouse, underground and popular film. James Newton explores the notion that cinema is an inherently subversive space, establishes criteria for deeming a film anarchic, and examines the place of underground and DIY filmmaking within the wider context of the category. The author identifies subversive undercurrents in cinema and uses anarchist political theory as an interpretive framework to analyse filmmakers, genres and the notion of cinema as an anarchic space.

Chapter 1

Unruly Cinema

In October 2014, The Guardian reported a series of incidents in a French cinema during screenings of the horror film Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, 2014), during which teenagers had been ‘fighting, throwing popcorn and even ripping up theatre seats’ (Child, 2014). The cinema manager complained that ‘some didn’t have the most elementary notion of how to behave […] they were throwing popcorn and talking at the top of their voices or walking round’. He lamented; ‘it’s not up to me to teach young people how to respect the law’. Note the phrases condemning the behaviour of the youths – ‘throwing popcorn’, ‘talking’, ‘walking around’ – none of which are illegal. Yet the law is invoked as something to be obeyed. What the manager is referring to, of course, is the law of the picture house, the laws of watching film, the laws of cinema.

This incident may now appear as a special or isolated case worthy of being a story on the website of a major newspaper, but it encapsulates the key elements of this chapter: there is a low-grade horror movie; the cinema is a regulated space with its own rules and laws governing ‘proper’ behaviour; and there is an audience that refuses to obey. The story illustrates the anxieties about cinema’s potential for housing, and even inciting dangerous or illicit behaviour – a result of the dynamics between film, audience, and spaces of exhibition. Such concerns have existed in relation to cinema since its inception, and provide a glimpse of its anarchic underbelly.

Richard Maltby locates cinema among a number of other popular forms of entertainment that are subversive, but which also operate under strict controls.

From amusement parks to rock ‘n’ roll, different sites and forms of popular cultural expression in the twentieth century derived their innovative energies from culturally and socially disreputable sources, but they have also operated under systems of convention and regulation that keep contained the subversive potential of their origins and that ensure they endorse, rather than challenge, the existing distribution of social, political, and economic power.

(Maltby, 1993: 41)

The amusement park Maltby refers to is a physical space where people can enjoy rides and attractions, congregate, and socialize, but also an arena in which to indulge in transgressive behaviour. Rock ‘n’ roll, on the other hand, represents an ideological or thematic space where the rebellion is contained in a genre of popular entertainment. Cinema combines this physical space of exhibition with a form of entertainment, and therefore has the propensity for both tangible and ideological rebellion. And, of all the disreputable entertainments that have drawn concern about their negative effect on social standards, it was cinema ‘which attracted the fiercest hostility and criticism’ (Pearson, 1984: 93).

Historically, cinema audiences have been governed through building regulations and safety procedures. Film content has also been subject to rules and restrictions. These controls, and the opportunity for subversion, become a perfect breeding ground to begin considering some of the ways in which cinema can be studied under the framework of anarchism and the ‘anarchic’. Anarchism as a political theory, anarchy as an impulse, provides the context for how these various subversions in cinema can be understood. This chapter is not a comprehensive assessment of all the ways in which it has been censored or regulated. Instead, it highlights historical moments that demonstrate the unruliness in cinema, and looks at the regulations and controls that have been implemented in attempts to curb any rowdiness in its congregation.

Cinema as Lawless Space

The notion of cinema as a place of anarchy, and a location for rowdy and uncontrolled behaviour, has been documented with particular nostalgia and affection in a number of popular films. Such nostalgia alludes to a previous age when it was a dominant mass art form – in the days before the widespread popularity of television – and was primarily associated with being entertainment for the working classes or the uncultured. Joe Dante’s Matinee (1993) is a celebration of this era, and features a William Castle-esque filmmaker publicizing a gimmick-laden horror/sci-fi feature called Mant! – about a half-man-half-ant hybrid created through the misuse of atomic radiation. Both Mant! and the theatre space are presented as a form of escapism. By being set in Florida in 1962 against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Matinee reveals, in its own affectionate way, the interplay between film, audiences, and politics. The cinema is presented as a social space, screening low-budget programmes that simultaneously reflect relevant political issues (in this case fear of nuclear war and atomic radiation). Where Dante’s film replicates this through a nostalgic gaze – a eulogy to an era long past – Wes Craven’s Scream 2 (1997) presents a similar perception of cinema in a contemporary setting.

Like the work of Dante, who began his career working for Roger Corman’s exploitation company New World Pictures, Craven’s first film, the notorious The Last House on the Left (1972), sat firmly in the low-cultural margins of the exploitation and horror genres. Scream 2 begins with two characters out on a date to see Stab a slasher movie based on the events depicted in the original Scream (1996). The couple have to queue to get in, with Stab proving a particularly popular attraction. Inside, the audience runs riot, some attired in the ‘Scream’ masks and costumes of the on-screen killer, wielding fake knives. These unidentified patrons inadvertently act as a decoy for the real killer, who roams amongst the crowd waiting to stalk and kill the dating couple. The noise and rowdiness of the audience, and their interaction with events on the screen, reveals an anarchy fostered by the horror/exploitation picture. In Scream 2, it is the lack of artistic quality of Stab that inspires the crowd’s unruliness. It is formulaic and dumb – leading to catcalls and other assorted interactions with the screen. It is violent enough for the crowd to flinch or cheer, but also so uninteresting in parts that the fun for the audience comes from the joy of being let loose in a theatre to create noise and act badly, rather than be immersed in the world of the film.

Figure 1: Auditorium of chaos in Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997).

The Scream series (1996–2011) fetishizes the horror movie audience by building narratives around the way movies are consumed. The first in the series (1996) reaches its climax at a house party, where part of the entertainment (alongside alcohol, sex, and drugs) is a VHS machine playing real-life slasher films (unlike the fictional Stab in the world of the sequels). Those watching John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) chat loudly throughout, but still cheer at the nudity and shocks, and quote the well-known dialogue. Scream 4 takes place several years later, after there has supposedly been a Decalogue of Stab sequels. Two student movie geeks organize an all-night screening of the fictional sequels playing back-to-back in a barn. As in Scream 2, there is chaos, the atmosphere closer to a party than a traditional screening; and once again, a killer hides among the costumed crowd. These scenes shift through the varying ways audiences organize their own culture around film based on the technology available to them: from the home video era presented in the original Scream, to the ability for amateurs to organize all-night screenings with projectors and DVDs in the final instalment. Scream 2, however, emphasizes the uniqueness of the traditional cinema space. In the first and fourth instalments of the franchise, those watching the films at the parties know each other since they belong to the same school or college but, in the darkness of the cinema, the shared experience – the sense of solidarity – is one that is undertaken amongst strangers.

Dante similarly presents such an anarchic vision of cinema in a key scene from Gremlins (1984), when the maniacal titular creatures enjoy time out from their rampage of terror to watch Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Popcorn explodes across the screen to indicate spontaneous disorder and anarchy. The legend of the gremlin as a monster who disrupts technology like some sort of demonic Luddite is replayed throughout the film, as they attack a middle-class, middle-American dream town; the standard symbol of conformity and complacency. In Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), they occupy the emblematic mark of capital: a high tech corporate skyscraper. Here, some of the more intelligent Gremlins have developed the ability to speak fluently, and take over the New York stock exchange, advising people to put all their money ‘into canned food and shotguns’ as they do so. They once again attack a cinema, and Dante includes a scene where they infiltrate a projection booth and disrupt Gremlins 2 itself, making it seem as if the film in the projector is melting. The illusion for a watching cinema audience is that the film has indeed broken down for real, until the silhouette of a Gremlin steps into the light to reveal it as a reflexive prank on the audience.

But it is in the first film that the Gremlins have their most iconic moment, as they sing along with the Seven Dwarfs on-screen, fight, and generally disrupt the performance of the animated classic. Except, of course, that their behaviour is barely any worse than that of the audience depicted in Scream 2. The Gremlins simply act in a manner that audiences were thought to have acted in the past, and which forms part of a memory of cinema-going for such fans of horror and exploitation as Dante and Craven. The Snow White scene in Gremlins is a celebration of cinema and its potential for inciting anarchy.

The origins of this notion of cinema – a place of disorder, crime, and appealing to the basest of emotions – have an historical truth. The audiences of low genres, such as those who frequent the art houses, articulate how spectators are integral to understanding the interplay between the anarchic and film. In examining Pauline Kael’s article, ‘Zeitgeist and Poltergeist, or are the movies going to pieces?’, where an audience’s raucous behaviour causes Kael much bemusement and displeasure, Joan Hawkins finds a parallel with similar conduct by audiences during early Dadaist shows where ‘audience participants would arrive at avant-garde events well armed with tomatoes, raw meat, and insults, which they would proceed to hurl at the artists on stage’ (2000: 60). Such behaviour was so integral to performances that, ‘like the punk rockers who came sixty years later, the performers would simply fling the projectiles (and epithets) back at the audience’ (2000: 60).

This element of interactive performance is easier to achieve with a live show, but one can see how the trend is invited to continue when the focus of a film is to affect a physical response. The potential for a film to ‘thrill, frighten, gross out, arouse, or otherwise directly engage the spectator’s body’ (Hawkins, 2000: 4) is a key feature of the low genres such as horror, the various strands of exploitation, and other paracinema.

Hawkins acknowledges that there is an idea of the movie house as a place for ‘a rigorous refusal of spectator passivity, a refusal that – in other contexts – has been lauded by Breton, Brecht, and Godard as avant-garde, even revolutionary’ (2000: 61). In other words, when the audience response is intellectualized by those who belong to part of the cultural elite, it can be considered political. But it needs this interjection of intellectual reasoning to render it as political resistance, otherwise the behaviour gets dismissed as the pointless actions of the hooligan; a dumb and reflexive response by the uneducated or uncultured, as demonstrated in the reaction to the disrupted screenings of Annabelle in France.

Kael’s distaste at such audience interaction, her feeling that ‘too many people are enjoying films for the wrong reasons [...] so much so it’s destroying the medium’ (2000: 64), reflects some concerns about a shift from an attentive audience to one which is, at best, distracted and, at worst, threatening. But, as Hawkins argues, this is not symptomatic of the destruction of the medium, but a return to its original, and natural, condition. This condition is dependent on class solidarity fostered through a shared experience – one that reveals the hidden anarchy present in cinema and film, where a sense of chaos is encouraged by interactions between audience, screen, and space.

The Early Cinema Audience

The distracted and boisterous audiences recounted in the tales by Hawkins, and in the films of Craven and Dante, are nearer in spirit to those who attended picture houses in cinema’s early years than the perception of an audience that sits in attentive silence. Michael Chanan charts the origins of the rowdy audience back beyond cinema to music hall theatre entertainment, and even to local fairs that took place on an annual basis dating back to the middle ages. He writes that though the ‘lifeblood’ of these audiences lacked a coherent political consciousness there was a definite ‘class solidarity’, and that early film culture was born into an already ‘strong sense of social class’ (1980 [1996]: 155) that the music hall had created. He also describes a business model of music hall theatre that cinema eventually imitated, based on the technology or product of film not being ‘passed directly into the hands of the consumer as a commodity’ (1980 [1996]: 23), in the same way that what was being exploited was an audience’s time in the theatre, with profits drawn from the box office (this model would continue until the rise of home video).

In Policing Cinema, Lee Grieveson writes that ‘legislative and reform activism’ (2004: 4) was a response to increasing numbers of working-class and immigrant patrons in attendance during cinema’s formative years. The movie theatre and the films being shown were deemed to have converged into a dualistic relationship; the unhealthy and unwashed masses being fed a diet of crude entertainment, both nourishing each other. David Church points out that a similar complimentary association existed many years later in the development of the medium in the fans of Exploitation Cinema, where the ‘violence, sexual deviance, dirtiness and cheapness’ of grindhouse cinemas in the United States was said to be ‘shared by many of the films shown in such venues’ (Church, 2016: 73).

To combat this relationship, early cinema was ‘policed’ as a space and as a ‘social body’ (Grieveson, 2004: 4), as well as being subject to censorship on-screen. This attempt at control also had its antecedents in music hall. Prior to the building of the specialist cinema, film shows often took place in music hall theatres, which had been ‘the dominant form of popular urban entertainment in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century’ (Chanan, 1980 [1996]: 130). Also, the general social and moral unease surrounding early cinema echoed that which permeated this earlier form of artistic practice, space of entertainment, and place of community. The middle classes ‘were uneasy and suspicious’ (1980 [1996]: 139) about music hall entertainment because it did not propose a moral correctness. It was also considered ‘anarchic but inarticulate’ (1980 [1996]: 139) by political radicals of the time because it was deemed to divert working class energy away from the political and into the purely social. These opinions precede those found in the intellectualization of audience response by Brecht and Godard, and shows how these working class or ‘anarchic’ audiences became a site for contestation by both moralists and radical critics – with audience behaviour condemned or celebrated, depending on the ideological position of the commentator.

Grieveson’s observation that ‘regulatory discourses, practices, and institutions in this period were linked to fundamental debates about the social functioning of cinema’ (2004: 4) continues to reverberate. He suggests three reasons as to why cinema was particularly vulnerable to legal and regulatory reforms as part of ‘an ongoing process of cultural contestation’ (2004: 13). First, he asserts that it was ‘the first form of mass entertainment and culture for an emerging mass public’ (2004: 13), a public that was predominantly working class, immigrant, or female, and who were attracted by cheap ticket prices. Second, films had a greater sense of realism than previous entertainments, and so were said to provoke imitative behaviour. Additionally, illicit behaviour was thought to be encouraged among moviegoers due to the natural cover afforded by the darkness of the auditorium. Third, the heightened awareness and fear of the new audiences was a response to ‘the forces of industrialisation, urbanisation, and immigration’ (2004: 13), and thus was an attempt to find some order amongst the ‘social dislocation’ (2004: 13) of the period. Out of this, it is possible to detect the ‘danger’ lurking in the potent combinations of screen, space, and audience: combinations that provoke a particular sense of anxiety based on the assumption that there was the potential for some uncontrollable undercurrent emanating from the working classes. From the perspective of political cinema, the question is how that power can be harnessed. For the anarchist working in film and film studies, this potential ‘threat’ should be celebrated.

Censorship in this period was based on two dominant themes: sex and politics. Grieveson reports that the National Board of Censorship, and other groups established as moral guardians, considered it ‘dangerous to disseminate knowledge about such important subjects as sexuality and politics to mass audiences’ (2004: 33). At the heart of this is the fear that such inflammatory representations of immorality, combined with films that debate politically, are particularly troublesome when placed in front of the uneducated. Many years into the development of film as an art form, a similar investigation of the politics of sex became the basis for Dusan Makavejev’s WR, Mysteries of the Organism (1971). According to Amos Vogel, the film ‘quite seriously proposes sex as the ideological imperative for revolution’ (1974: 153), based as it is on the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The film, in its ‘opposition to all oppressive social systems, East or West’ (1974: 155), positions itself close to the anti-Statism of anarchist theory. Given this anti-State ethos, Richard Porton declares it ‘surprising that critical literature on the film hasn’t yielded a full-fledged anarchist analysis’, while also acknowledging that anarchism cannot be used as a ‘Rosetta Stone for decoding W.R. in a glib or “totalizing” manner’ (2011: 134). While Makavejev’s film is theoretically and aesthetically a world away from the popular films being shown to audiences in the early part of the twentieth century, it helps to determine a consistent line of thought around these anarchic amalgamations of sex and politics.

John Trevelyan, former head of the British Board of Film Censors (before the name was switched from ‘Censors’ to ‘Classification’ in 1984), demonstrates that what generated the principal cause of concern in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Anarchy, Anarchism, and the Cinematic Context
• Chapter 1: Unruly Cinema
• Chapter 2: Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Film
• Chapter 3: Anarchy and Anarchism in the St Trinian’s Movies
• Chapter 4: The Women in Prison Film and Anarchist Analysis
• Chapter 5: Anarchism, Activism, and the Cinema Space
• Conclusion: The Anarchist Cinema and Beyond1
• Filmography
• References
• Index