REVIEW: Films to hound the anarchist consciousness

Projectile Anarchist Festival
February 11-13, 2005
by peter moore

February 13, 2005 -- The Newcastle-based Projectile collective has brought together a nice pack of films that will hound your consciousness and tickle your tail.

The festival featured films ranging from serious documentaries such as An Injury To One to tragic-comedy The Cockettes. Most of the film showings on the Saturday and Sunday had seats full, if not people sitting in the aisles.

The community spirit of the festival contrasted with the mass deployment of hundreds of yellow-jacketed police officers who shut down the Quayside road on the other side of the Tyne river (!) from the New Labour conference featuring Prime Minister Tony Blair.

An Injury To One by director Travis Wilkerson told the story of Butte, Montana and the struggle for control of copper mines that, at one point, yielded ten per cent of the world’s copper supply. Anaconda company goons killed Industrial Worker of the World organizer Frank Little whose speeches drew thousands of miners and their families to hear about a world that could be their world, instead of the world of the copper bosses. Wilkerson made a mistake by using picturesque tableaus, subtitles and mind-numbingly melancholy music to teach the audience the miners’ songs. However, he redeemed the film by closing the circle and showing the devastation and contamination of Butte, Montana, today, a town still fighting to survive beside an open pit mine-cum-toxic lake.

The Take of Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, in its informal United Kingdom premiere, told the story of the Argentinean workers movement to take over factories abandoned or shut down by their owners during the economic crisis of 2001. The human perspective of this film brought me close to tears on occasion. The slogan of the worker-controlled cooperatives, “Resist, Occupy and Produce” showed the audience that criticism without positive action is a losing strategy. The film also demonstrated the precarity of this fledgling movement and its dependency on town legislators and judges that all too often represent the interests of the powerful and corrupt, rather than the workers and their families.

The Cockettes was a hilarious and tragic look at hippy theatre, sexual play and culture in androgynous Seventies San Francisco. It follows four years of fantastic theatre that collapsed not long after the show’s inspirational figure, Hibiscus, leaves and the show flops in a commercial production in New York. The movie’s eccentricity, stock footage and great interviews make it a spectacular film to experience.

Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman by director Mel Bucklin paints the portrait of one of the United States’ best known anarchists. Her story is inspiring, personal and open to a no-holds-barred critique by historians and writers. The story of her and thousands of others’ deportation stands as a stark warning to everyone that a State at war is the enemy of its own population and all the freedoms held dear.

10 Days That Shook The World directed by Chris Reeves was billed in the program as the “even we haven’t seen it yet” world premiere. If they had, the movie would have been left on the editing machine. Based on footage gathered at the 1994 Anarchist Gathering in London (almost 11 years ago so why drag it out now?), the film falls short of telling the stories of a diverse anarchist movement. For an outsider to the London anarchist scene, the interviews exclude the audience, because they do not name or provide a context outside of ranting (and what anarchist can’t do that?!?). The most coherent story arc is about the anarchist-feminist debate about pornography, S&M and sexuality. Now that's a film I'd like to see. The rest seems more like a reel of someone’s crass and occasionally funny home videos.

As for the Saturday night entertainment, it was a good time from what little I saw of it. The talk-to-anyone environment of the festival's Cabaret Night on Saturday contrasted with the truly insane bravado of barely clothed men and women on the streets for a night out in freezy breezy Newcastle.

Projectile is offering up this program to other groups across the country. It will be worth it for the many people who didn’t make it to Newcastle this past weekend. Here's their web site:  http://www.projectile.org.uk/