#52, 4/19 – Anarchism in America (1983) (dvd)

On a Saturday morning in, hmmm, December probably, I was taking the el home from the pub and skimming through an Utne Reader. I was just getting back into the movie-watching habit at the time, so I looked through their movie reviews with great interest. I ended up adding three DVDs to my rental queue that day: Anarchism in America, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, and Breasts. I find it kind of funny, truth be told, that it’s taken me four months to get to even one of them and the other two are way, way down on my list (though I do reshuffle my queues with great regularity).

A fascinating—if not entirely satisfying—documentary created in 1981, the film gives a primer on, well, Anarchism... in America. There are clips of Emma Goldman, Sacco & Vanzetti , Murray Bookchin and Karl Hess, among others.

Truthfully, it’s Hess who interests me the most. Probably because I like learning about the alignment shifts certain people made in the 60s and 70s and Hess’s case is one of the more interesting. It’s not every day that someone who used to work with Goldwater ends up an anti-statist. Though, when listening to Hess in this film, I almost have to wonder why it didn’t happen more often.