Wednesday 26 October 2016

Neither God Nor Master: A History of Anarchism


This documentary on anarchist history (in the original French Ni dieu ni maître: Un histoire de l’anarchisme), directed by Patrick Barbéris and scripted by Tancrède Ramonet, and to which my book Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire contributed ideas of historical structure and for which I was interviewed in Paris in 2013, is currently being screened on TV to acclaim by anarchists in Sweden. The Temps Noir film has been edited into three versions: 1. DVD 3 x 90 minutes; 2. Arte France (French TV) 2 x 70 minutes; and 3. International version 5 x 52 minutes. 

The historians interviewed include Kenyon Zimmer (USA), Normand Baillargeon (Canada), Jean-Yves Mollier (France), Gaetano Manfredonia (Italy), Jean-Christophe Angaut (France), Mikhail Tsovma (Russia), Robert Graham (Canada), Marianne Enckell (Switzerland), Michael Schmidt (South Africa), Matthew Carr (UK), Alain Dobouf (France), Giampietro Berti (italy), Servando Rocha (Spain), Frank Mintz (France), Eric Aunoble (Switzerland) and Édouard Waintrop (France).

The trajectory of the shorter (2.3-hour) French version is interesting if pretty conventional for Francophone audiences: Proudhon, Bakunin, the Paris Commune, the Chicago Martyrs, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian & Ukrainian Revolutions, the Kronstadt Revolt, anarchist repression in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, China, Japan, and the USA, the anti-fascist resistance... and it then breaks with convention by going into detail on the Platform, before continuing with the Spanish Revolution. I'm really keen to see the longer (4.5-hour) DVD in English so that I can give a proper estimation, as my French is poor!