Explore the vast range of titles available.

Hailed since its initial release, Film and the Anarchist Imagination offers the authoritative account of films featuring anarchist characters and motifs. Richard Porton delves into the many ways filmmakers have portrayed anarchism's long traditions of labor agitation and revolutionary struggle. While acknowledging cinema's predilection for ludicrous anarchist stereotypes, he focuses on films that, wittingly or otherwise, reflect or even promote workplace resistance, anarchist pedagogy, self-emancipation, and anti-statist insurrection. Porton ranges from the silent era to the classics Zéro de Conduite and Love and Anarchy to contemporary films like The Nothing Factory while engaging the works of Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, Lina Wertmüller, Yvonne Rainer, Ken Loach, and others. For this updated second edition, Porton reflects on several new topics, including the negative portrayals of anarchism over the past twenty years and the contemporary embrace of post-anarchism.

Keywords offers a conversational journey through the overlying terrains of politically engaged art and artistically engaged politics, combining a major statement on subversive aesthetics, a survey of radical film strategies, and a lexicon of over a thousand terms and concepts. * No other book combines an ambitious essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a lexicon of terms and ideas, many of which are new and innovative * Creates and illustrates over a thousand terms and concept, drawing its examples from a wide range of media * Provides a broad timespan, covering the very ancient (Ramayana, Aristotle) to the most current (digital mashups, memes) * Uniquely discusses the areas of film, television and the internet within one book * No other book combines an ambitious essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a lexicon of terms and ideas, many of which are new and innovative

All of the leading anarchist figures—Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Goldman—joined forces with influential figures from the arts. And members of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ aesthetic avantgardes often aligned themselves with anarchists. For Donald Drew Egbert, this alliance can be attributed to “the highly individualistic, anti-official, and artistically revolutionary nature of so much avant-garde art since the late eighteenth century.”¹ Yet although there have often been ties between aesthetic radicals and the libertarian left, it is not likely that necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of “anarchist art” will ever be formulated. A monolithic anarchist aesthetic must

It is not at all surprising that anarchism has been marginalized by mainstream historians. The cliché “hidden from history” has rarely been more apt. Historians often reduce anarchist history to a series of sterile platitudes, and it would be foolish to expect filmmakers to depart from the stereotypes and half-truths that pepper seemingly reputable texts, whether by unabashedly conservative writers or the estimable Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.¹ Before proceeding to nuanced historical films that fulfill Robert Rosenstone’s injunction to “interrogate the past for the sake of the present, creating a historical world complex enough so that it overflows with meaning;

The hegemony enjoyed by mainstream socialists in the years following the Russian Revolution relegated anarchism to a relatively marginal status. (Spain, as we shall see, was a notable exception.) Filmmakers implicitly accepted Max Nomad’s conclusion that anarchism was a “dying creed”¹ and moved on to trendier objects of opprobrium. Occasionally, however, a reference to Bakunin proved sufficient to establish a protagonist’s rebellious credentials. In Sergio Leone’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to the romance of explosives during the Mexican Revolution, A Fistful of Dynamite (a.k.a. Duck You Sucker, 1972),² an anarchist peasant named Juan (played with slapstick relish by Rod Steiger) embodies a

Conservatives, liberals, and Marxists have all devoted a considerable amount of energy to evaluating and, in some respects, transforming educational theory and practice. Yet the preoccupation of anarchists with the nuances of pedagogy is unmatched by any other political tendency. It is, of course, difficult to overlook a recent efflorescence of pedagogical theory by nonanarchists, primarily neo-Marxist and post-structuralist writers. The theoretical importance of this work should not be glibly dismissed, but, for better or worse, it is not easy to bridge the gap between postmodern pedagogical theory, primarily the work of academics, and the contributions of anarchist theorists and

If any proof is needed that anarchism is far from a monolithic creed, the continuing conflict between anarcho-syndicalists and proponents of the “refusal of work” provides evidence of the animating tensions within contemporary anarchism. To a certain extent, debates between the inheritors of an anarcho-syndicalist tradition, pioneered by Rudolf Rocker and Diego Abad de Santillán, and contemporary anarchists and neo-Luddites represent a schism between nineteenth-century “workerism” and a late-twentiethcentury skepticism concerning the advisability of promoting the workplace as the only possible locus for direct action and social change. Yet the tensions between syndicalists and advocates of a militant “anti-work” position,

Keywords offers a conversational journey through the overlying terrains of politically engaged art and artistically engaged politics, combining a major statement on subversive aesthetics, a survey of radical film strategies, and a lexicon of over a thousand terms and concepts. No other book combines an ambitious essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a lexicon of terms and ideas, many of which are new and innovative Creates and illustrates over a thousand terms and concept, drawing its examples from a wide range of media Provides a broad timespan, covering the very ancient (Ramayana, Aristotle) to the most current (digital mashups, memes) Uniquely discusses the areas of film, television and the internet within one book No other book combines an ambitious essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a lexicon of terms and ideas, many of which are new and innovative