In Defense of Bad Filmmaking, or Why I Made a Film About Anarchists

If you haven’t done so yet, please check out Lockbox: An Anarchist Tale.  Let me know what you think about it (by leaving a comment on the film’s Current.com page, please!) then come on back and read the rest of this.

I’ve been getting less-than-favorable feedback about this piece, or no feedback at all (which I consider bad).  When people do choose to talk to me about it, they usually make one or more of the following points:

1) It’s hard to focus on the piece when the material and characters are so polarizing.

2) The filmmaker does a poor job of challenging the anarchists, but also fails to give an adequate reason to support them.  In other words, it’s hard to tell if I, the viewer, am supposed to agree with them or not.

3) The anarchists come off stupid.

I’ll address these criticisms one at a time, which makes sense, since I was the one who quantified them in the first place.  And before I begin, I have to state that I can take criticism.  In fact I wish I had more of it, but so far the only criticism I’m getting centers around elements that I considered while producing this piece, elements that I had hoped the piece addressed.

1) The material and characters are polarizing:  Um, no shit.  The characters and their actions are going to elicit a range of responses from audiences, from outrage to understanding, but hopefully not boredom.  That’s got nothing to do with me, and everything to do with them.  I, for one, have never considered that to be a bad thing.  When Jean Cocteau produced his adaptation of Antigone in Germany on the brink of World War II, critics noticed that the play was received in two profoundly different ways: Jews aligned with Antigone, the passionate, come-what-may adolescent hellbent on defying the state and laying her brother to rest.  Nazis, on the other hand, appreciated the difficult position of the pensive King Creon, who must uphold the sanctity of the state by desecrating the corpse of his own nephew.  I’m no Jean Cocteau (a fact that has been well-documented) but I don’t think I need to be, either.  I’ve got the advantage of working with real characters whose actions I consider to be just as passion-induced (and inducing) as those of Antigone.  Furthermore, it’s not the job of the filmmaker to take the polarizing and make it palatable, especially in a documentary format.  We live in a world of many different colors, some of them extreme.  I hope my camera can capture all of them.

Some would say, “Don’t you want to explain these people to your audience and raise their understanding?  Isn’t that making the polarizing palatable?”  In a sense, they’re right, and perhaps there my film falls short of what I would like it to accomplish.  But the fact is that the anarchists said the things they said, did the things they did, and that these were not uncommon or misrepresented words and deeds.  To say that the film fails because these things aren’t put into a logic that the dominant ideology can understand is to miss the point of the film (and the anarchists).  The anarchists operate according to their own logic, and it would be disingenuous to try to translate it into the logic of the dominant culture.  To say that it fails because their acts are not adequately explained is a bit more valid, but I think there’s a case to be made for bewilderment.  A film can engage with the world in any way it chooses, and the world isn’t always easily explained.  Which brings me to…

2) Am I supposed to agree with them or not? What do you think?  You’ve seen the footage.  You’ve had a chance to watch the anarchists and their actions without the annoying, nasally voice of a pretentious film student telling you what to think.  If you feel that the piece lacks enough context for you to form a judgment then I apologize; I’ve always had a difficult time figuring out where adequate context becomes editorializing.  However, the argument that the piece fails because it doesn’t choose a side is one that I find difficult to accept, and not because I’m a big proponent of the 50/50 school of journalism (I’m not).

You don’t hear a lot about anarchists.  There aren’t a lot of movies that feature realistic anarchist characters (unless you think the Joker is an accurate portrayal of a complex social theory). Sure, I could have made a bulleted list of why you should support the anarchists and read through it on screen.  Or I could have made the opposite list about why they’re totally wrong, in which case people would ask me why I made this film in the first place.  Or I could have done both, and said, “Here’s one side, here’s the other.  Which is right?” which is exactly what the 6 o’clock news does.  But instead I opted to let the anarchists make their case, on their terms, in a logic that made sense to them.  The obvious critique of this is that it’s biased.  I can already hear Chris Fers saying, “You wouldn’t do that for President Bush!”  He’s right.

The President is an authority figure and – for better or for worse – authority figures get the benefit of the doubt. The anarchists, as members of an opposing ideology, don’t get that benefit.  Viewers bring an already well-honed skepticism to a film about anarchists, and it’s a kind of skepticism that they don’t apply (or didn’t used to) when dealing with, say, Preisdent Bush.  Authority figures already get their voices heard.  The pres has a spokesperson on every news broadcast.  Comparatively, when was the last time you heard an anchor say, “Bill Ayers, what’s your take on this issue?” Anarchist voices are rarely heard, and it’s not because we as a culture have successfully discredited their ideas.  We don’t need to listen to Nazis or Confederates; we know their ideas don’t work.  We haven’t seen that same kind of intellectual defeat of the anarchists.  Until we do (if ever we should), the spirit of free speech and democracy should govern this cultural discussion.  Perhaps Nietzsche said it best: “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” 

3) The anarchists come off stupid. I hope Nathan and I made the anarchists (and Somorra in particular) look as smart as they are, because they are smart people.  And you can disagree with smart people.  You can also support a social movement without being able to speak specifically to its finer points.  I read an interview from the 1800’s with one of the last surviving Revolutionary war vets.  The interviewer asked him, “How big an influence were the writings of Locke?”  And the vet said, “Who?”  And the interviewer said, “Well certainly you must have been familiar with Locke, or Hobbes, or Adam Smith.”  And the vet said, “Listen, my neighbor grabbed his gun, and so I grabbed my gun, and that’s how the revolution came about.”

So that’s all I have to say for now. But seriously, leave some comments on the Current page, leave some comments here, and lets get this discussion going!