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Cinema/Utopia: An Interview with Richard Porton
December 28, 2006 - 4:29pm -- autonomedia
borninflames writes:
Cinema/Utopia:
An Interview with Richard Porton
Andrew Hedden, Lucid Screening
Reading Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination [Verso 1999] brought me back to my love for film years after I more or less abandoned it for political activism. Politics really come first in my life — as a lot of the content on Lucid Screening probably shows — but I’m always holding out for those places, so few and far between, where film and politics can coincide to the benefit of both. I found such a place in Porton's book: in its exploration of an anarchist aesthetic, and for all its academic lingo, I hold it to be — along with Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed — one of the most intriguing pieces of anarchist theory written in the past fifty years.
The book left me wanting more. It’s in this spirit that I contacted Porton for an interview on the occasion of Andy Horbal’s Film-Criticism-Blog-a-thon.
Many thanks are due Porton, and not just for granting this interview: he is woefully rare in the world of both film and political criticism for his strong willingness to wrestle with, in his words, the “probably… irresolvable tension between great art and good politics.” In this interview, Porton discusses a broad range of subjects, among them the reception of his 1999 book; the aims of film criticism; his work as co-editor of Cineaste magazine; whatever anarchism might offer cinema; and that ever-pesky push and pull between aesthetics and politics.Q: It has now been nearly eight years since the publication of Film and the Anarchist Imagination. It appeared at a time when interest in anarchism – represented, but by no means limited to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests – was increasing. What has been the book’s reception, among film critics, political activists, and others? In hindsight, what do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of the book?
Porton: While the book appeared at a propitious time when anarchism was emerging from the fog of obscurity (in the wake of the fall of Communism, anarchism was no longer a supposedly antiquated creed that supposedly fell by the wayside after 1917), it was conceived years before during an era when anti-authoritarian radicalism (anti-Leninist Marxism as well as anarchism) was condemned as “infantile leftism” by mainstream radicals and considered risible, if harmless, by mainstream politicos. I still cringe a bit when I recall meeting some graduate students in the 1980s during a research sojourn at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. One of them mentioned he was researching the history of Dutch social democracy and politely asked me about my field of interest. When I told him that I was exploring the relationship between film and anarchism, he burst out laughing. Even well-meaning film scholars assumed that “anarchist cinema” merely referred to either the inadvertently Dadaist comedy of the Marx Bros. or the rarefied realm of the avant-garde.
While I have considerable respect for both Groucho’s sardonic wit and experimental cinema, I was more interested in emphasizing affinities between specific “emancipatory moments” within the political history of anarchism (e.g. the Paris Commune, the Spanish Revolution) and cinema. Perhaps the burgeoning popularity of authors such as Murray Bookchin and, to a certain extent, Noam Chomsky, has familiarized intellectuals and leftists with this terrain. But when I started out, I had to contend with a lot of well-intentioned ignorance.
In general, the book was probably more warmly received by anarchists than film scholars. Although I received favorable reviews in film journals such as Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and Cineaste (while I’m one of the editors, I had nothing to do with assigning the book for review and recused myself from the review process), my work has been strenuously ignored by most film academics. For better or worse, Film and the Anarchist Imagination gave short shrift to most of the trends that captivate academic film scholars—whether formal analysis, convoluted Lacanian approaches or the fetishization of ephemeral pop culture obsessions. Yet anarchist film buffs didn’t seem to care about these matters and I’ve certainly benefited from their enthusiasm and knowledge. In the final analysis, it was a much better decision to go with a political publisher like Verso than to pursue the route of a university press. It might have not given me much street cred with the academics. But I believe I probably reached a broader, and more activist, public.
borninflames writes:
Cinema/Utopia:
An Interview with Richard Porton
Andrew Hedden, Lucid Screening
Reading Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination [Verso 1999] brought me back to my love for film years after I more or less abandoned it for political activism. Politics really come first in my life — as a lot of the content on Lucid Screening probably shows — but I’m always holding out for those places, so few and far between, where film and politics can coincide to the benefit of both. I found such a place in Porton's book: in its exploration of an anarchist aesthetic, and for all its academic lingo, I hold it to be — along with Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed — one of the most intriguing pieces of anarchist theory written in the past fifty years.
The book left me wanting more. It’s in this spirit that I contacted Porton for an interview on the occasion of Andy Horbal’s Film-Criticism-Blog-a-thon.
Many thanks are due Porton, and not just for granting this interview: he is woefully rare in the world of both film and political criticism for his strong willingness to wrestle with, in his words, the “probably… irresolvable tension between great art and good politics.” In this interview, Porton discusses a broad range of subjects, among them the reception of his 1999 book; the aims of film criticism; his work as co-editor of Cineaste magazine; whatever anarchism might offer cinema; and that ever-pesky push and pull between aesthetics and politics.Q: It has now been nearly eight years since the publication of Film and the Anarchist Imagination. It appeared at a time when interest in anarchism – represented, but by no means limited to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests – was increasing. What has been the book’s reception, among film critics, political activists, and others? In hindsight, what do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of the book?
Porton: While the book appeared at a propitious time when anarchism was emerging from the fog of obscurity (in the wake of the fall of Communism, anarchism was no longer a supposedly antiquated creed that supposedly fell by the wayside after 1917), it was conceived years before during an era when anti-authoritarian radicalism (anti-Leninist Marxism as well as anarchism) was condemned as “infantile leftism” by mainstream radicals and considered risible, if harmless, by mainstream politicos. I still cringe a bit when I recall meeting some graduate students in the 1980s during a research sojourn at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. One of them mentioned he was researching the history of Dutch social democracy and politely asked me about my field of interest. When I told him that I was exploring the relationship between film and anarchism, he burst out laughing. Even well-meaning film scholars assumed that “anarchist cinema” merely referred to either the inadvertently Dadaist comedy of the Marx Bros. or the rarefied realm of the avant-garde.
While I have considerable respect for both Groucho’s sardonic wit and experimental cinema, I was more interested in emphasizing affinities between specific “emancipatory moments” within the political history of anarchism (e.g. the Paris Commune, the Spanish Revolution) and cinema. Perhaps the burgeoning popularity of authors such as Murray Bookchin and, to a certain extent, Noam Chomsky, has familiarized intellectuals and leftists with this terrain. But when I started out, I had to contend with a lot of well-intentioned ignorance.
In general, the book was probably more warmly received by anarchists than film scholars. Although I received favorable reviews in film journals such as Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and Cineaste (while I’m one of the editors, I had nothing to do with assigning the book for review and recused myself from the review process), my work has been strenuously ignored by most film academics. For better or worse, Film and the Anarchist Imagination gave short shrift to most of the trends that captivate academic film scholars—whether formal analysis, convoluted Lacanian approaches or the fetishization of ephemeral pop culture obsessions. Yet anarchist film buffs didn’t seem to care about these matters and I’ve certainly benefited from their enthusiasm and knowledge. In the final analysis, it was a much better decision to go with a political publisher like Verso than to pursue the route of a university press. It might have not given me much street cred with the academics. But I believe I probably reached a broader, and more activist, public.