Arena One: On Anarchist Cinema

by Russell Campbell (Editor), Pietro Ferrua (Contributor), Dan Georgakas (Contributor)

In the wake of the end of the Cold War and worldwide protests against corporate globalization, anarchism continues to attract new adherents among both aging leftists and new generations of young radicals. Arena aims to tap into this revived interest in libertarian ideas, culture and practice by providing a dynamic focal a journal that brings together good, stimulating and provocative writing and scholarship on libertarian culture of all kinds.

Designed for a general, intelligent, popular readership as well as for scholars and aficionados working in the area, the first issue of Arena focuses on film and video—historical and modern—and future issues will cover the entire spectrum of the film, theatre, and art criticism as well as political theory and practice, reportage, letters, reviews, and unpublished fiction and nonfiction.

Genres: History

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Putting this one away for now. I may come back to it at some point, but to be honest, I doubt I will. This book's editor, Richard Porton, has written a much better book on the subject called "Film and the Anarchist Imagination." Yet both texts suffer from the same problem: there's simply not a lot of material to work from. Whereas since the birth of the medium, there has always been a strong association between cinema and Marxism (see: classic Soviet cinema, the Hollywood 10, elements of the French New Wave, Latin American 'Third Cinema', or the vast body of Marxist film theory from the Frankfurt school onward), the sad truth is that anarchists traditionally haven't been filmmakers (or film critics or film theorists for that matter). This collection, continuing the work laid out by Porton's other book, attempts to give an account of some of the few overlaps between cinema and anarchism that have existed. While there are some interesting tidbits of history to be gleaned from the book, unfortunately the essays are for the most part not very well written, and most give only a very surface level overview of the figures, institutions, and films they describe. This isn't to mention the unbearably corny layout, replete with fake advertisements. Maybe by giving up so early I'm missing some great essays (the one on cinema during the Spanish Revolution complete with budgets and accounting records seems to at least have more meat to it), but my general sentiment seems to be that instead of cobbling together the few scraps of information that exist on the subject, maybe anarchists should focus on actually making films. Then we'd have something to write about! Either that, or we should get better at writing film history.

[Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea · Rating 3 out of 5]

A new journal looking at anarchism and film, video, theatre, art, criticism, ideas, political theory and practice, ideas, reportage, nonfiction and fiction. This particular journal looked at anarchist film and video with the most memorable, and longest, essay being about the different left-wing film syndicates during the Spanish Civil War. Pretty interesting stuff, yet fairly difficult to stay engaged with. It wasn't that the writing or the concepts weren't accessible, just that I felt like I didn't have enough foundational knowledge to totally understand what the writer was saying. The essay also felt somewhat scattered. I have the second volume of the journal and am going to read it as well. In this volume there were film reviews at the end and more historical stuff at the front. Not bad, but not great.