1976 – Out of the Present (documentary by Andrei Ujică 1995)

https://vimeo.com/325601048

Out of the Present is one of the most mind-boggling examples of documentary making (in my experience) to come out of what the Germans call “Wende”, the 1989 turn, or what in Romania is known as the – “tranzitie” – the protracted transition of the early 1990s after the Romanian Revolution. The Romanian 1989 Revolution is left as the only – brutal, bloody revolution. Yet we have another example maybe even more emblematic – because it had much more wider repercussions. The 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt also known as the August coup – is often depicted as the fight btw the reformists and the old guard soviet apparatchiks, with the reformist faction run by Boris Eltsin winning. Well, the result was the total collapse of the Communist Party and the immediate collapse of the Soviet State. In fact, in retrospect, this could be read as actually the first important step in the shock therapy economic measures – that have afflicted Russia, but all the other countries of the east bloc as well – be it Romania, Bulgaria (maybe not so much Poland and the Baltic nation-states). Another exception is CPR – China being one of those rare, maybe only countries that got forewarned and beforehand refused any structural liberalization of its core industries preferring instead a gradual liberalization from the margins, a dual pricing system and many other things which none of the previous examples followed (including Romania and Russia). In fact one can say that without first the annihilation of the party and the state, all the other – price liberalization etc privatization of industries, even the rise of the oligarchs and Putin – would have not been possible.

Andrei Ujică is one of the most accurate analyzers of mediatic sociological political mutations – and he helped Harun Farocki make the Videograms of a Revolution documentary in 1992 practically the best documentation we have about the first televised revolution – about the various framings, affective overflow and post-spectacle operations taking place on TV, with actual theatre actors becoming revolutionaries and so on. They were both digging into hours and hours of TV materials to be able to offer this comprehensive study of broadcasted images and audio-visualization of politics.

Out of Present is something else – it presents the Soviet Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev leaving Earth and CCCP for a space mission on MIR to return and reenter Earth in a new country called Russia. It is for me one of the most stark example of space dilation that does not take just its relativistic time consequences to their limit but also the subjective experience of somebody who is caught on orbit, who is dependent on a sort of terrestrial life support system that was on the verge of collapse, an infrastructure that brought Gagarin first in orbit, the first human to leave terrestrial space. It spans the entire collapse of the Soviet Union but from a cosmic perspective of sorts and during the routine of one of the most enduring dreams of humanity, the one that links communism with the exploration of outer space. There is much to be teased out of this documentary so I leave it up to the viewers. This documentary was included in the New Temporealities show at the Scena 9 BRD residency in Bucharest this year. Below is my text on it – for the room 7 of the exhibition where the movie was screened.

07 Out of the Present into Space

What happens when time plays tricks on you up there, when you rely on and depend on once-functioning life support systems, guided systems that put the first humans in orbit around the Earth? What happens when you depend more than ever on a space exploration infrastructure that sent you there, but which for the moment remains suspended? Abandonment is the occasion to get out of a continuous present, dislocated from that home that is no longer on Earth, the place where even the system that sent you towards the stars will soon cease to exist.

This portal, which measures the drift out of time and into unknown space, is discontinuous. Just as time becomes difficult to measure, suddenly there is a place where worlds are suspended, and far too quickly destructured and atomized. Many SF comics and cover artists felt the need to abandon drawing when they encountered the prowess of CGI post-production, because they felt 3D modeling was already fulfilling their purpose, delimiting all possible actions in advance.

The exit from the present takes place when everything is spatialized, leaving room for movement through the frozen time of others, even through the unimaginable speed of some spaceships flying over a fiery exoplanetary landscape far from here and now. Entering in instantaneous and short-term memory, images are no longer subjected to linear succession. The fast pursuit is no longer a pursuit but a suspension in between. It’s ready to happen, and yet it doesn’t happen.

 

1490 – No Gods, No Masters (2016)

• documentary in 3 parts directed by Ramonet (Tancrède)
• produced by Arte France and Temps Noir

This is the story of Anarchism. By going back over the key events of the last two centuries of social history, the series reveals, for the first time, the origins and destiny of a political trend that has been fighting all gods and all masters for over 150 years.

Who exactly are they? Where do those who have always called themselves anarchists come from and what is their line of thought? Why do we consider their thinking to be confused and their history such a cause for concern?
Featuring previously unseen and forgotten archive footage, in addition to outstanding documentation and accounts by world experts, this documentary series recounts the history of a movement that from Paris to New York, and from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, has constantly imbued the world with its freedom and revolt.

the various directions of socialism and their preferred methods

Long version in French NI DIEU NI MAITRE VERSION LONGUE COMPLETE 3h34

Episode 1 : PART ONE: THE PASSION FOR DESTRUCTION (1840-1906)

Episode 2 : PART TWO: LAND AND FREEDOM (1907-1921)

Episode 3 : PART THREE: IN MEMORY OF THE VAINQUISHED (1922-1945)

While not immediately visible, I’m sure the anarchist movement is always morphing, taking new forms in Romania and has recognized its own rich if misunderstood history. I am sure now it will be not as easily be transformed into a caricature and witch-hunt as during the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, when the majority of TV broadcasting channels immediately rallied behind the repressive powers of the Romanian government, castigating any anti-NATO peaceful protesters as suspicious troublemakers, intruders or labeling them as terrorists or trouble makers in the media.

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  Voltairine de Cleyre

It is by no means a homemade documentary, it is made with a budget and also uses a lot of visual documentary and archival material as well as historians and researchers. This is truly another history of known social movements, different from the history as written in manuals or thought at school by the liberal establishment, social democracy and one that clarifies its sometimes embittered relation with communist/Marxist tradition although always in conjunction and often intertwined with it. A history that has to be understood in its relations to the Marxist school of critical thought and to the larger Revolutionary movements worldwide such as the Mexican, the Russian Revolution, the Paris Commune or the Spanish Civil War.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

In an especially bitter chapter it is revisiting the anti anarchist reprisals in Soviet Russia against its former political allies, Russia being one of the historical hotbeds of world anarchism (Bakunin, Kropotkin etc). But it does not stop there – on a map one can see Anarchism springing up everywhere in Italy, Germany, South America, Australia, China, Japan, Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Greece) etc It also gives examples about how much the monarchies and repressive governments of the world felt the anarchist threat – the very first terrorist movement of proportions using bombs and even cars in their exploits. Anarchists invented and experimented with both peaceful means as well as violent ones – propaganda by the deed. They responded to the brutality of police and the armed attacks against the striking masses.

There’s always difficulty to separate the ‘wrong’ from the righteous violence without enacting the policemen in your head, the white/paramilitary Boogaloo bois as bad actors or outside agitators infiltration from the protesters and looting sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Although thconfusion and sometimes overlap, such divisions and labeling only plays into the hand of the sliding grip of ethno-nationalist state power that tries to outlaw Antifa in the US and brand as terrorist the black block. Instead of making a point about the bad apples a better point to make is about the persistence or concept of -propriety in the midst of looting by people who were propriety. Be it the Paris Commune or now during the welcome temporary abolition of property is this to be seen – only during such revolutionary upheavals the debt deeds are being burned, the paperwork goes up in flames and tehnocratic centers of command are being shaken.

In historical times tutorials with artisanal bombs in anarchist mags abounded and the assassinations of presidents and monarchs made them infamous, the Propaganda of the Deed drew both admiration & ire of the public. Interpol was basically founded to counter act the anarchist global threat as perceived during the 1890s. This was the first war on terror before the Bush retoric took it on again. The follow-up was always a regrouping from direction action into the fold of cooperatives and going one more time grassroots and trying to built things from base up.

the Magón brothers

It is also in my knowledge one of the first historical documentaries to accord such an importance to the Mexican Revolution as the first truly anarchist revolution as well as its relationship to Emiliano Zapata. This was also one of its biggest stumbling blocks – the suspicion, common to all world proletariat revolutions against the peasants leading the way, with the possible exception of the Maoist or Ho Chi Minh revolutionary struggles in Asia. Zapata and his peasant Christian anarchist troops got a cold welcome in the city.

Very important the early role of industrial city of Chicago in the early workers rights movement, a proletarian city par excellence, at the epicenter of railway and meat processing industry. Chicago was the place of the Haymarket affair and also had an incredible anarchist press largely conducted by immigrants (including esoterica Jewish Kabbalah bookshops according to Erik Davis), paving the way to the celebrations of the 1st of May.

It’s the best way to learn about the Internationalist dimensions of Anarchism, it’s past popularity and future promise, be it trough its magazines, newspapers and a lot lives lived fully by such historical figures such as:

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Itō Noe, Ōsugi Sakae,

Liu Shifu, Li Shizeng, Sacco and Vanzetti, Ricardo Flores Magón, Buenaventura Durutti, Nestor Makhno and many others. Roughly it is the tumultuous, exalted, incredibly bloody and diverse history from 1840 to 1945 comprising all sort of directions, splinter groups and innovation brought by and with the help of anarchists, be it in the frame of collectivist, mutualist, Propaganda of the Deed, utopian socialism, libertarianism, radical individualism, anti-authoritarianism, nihilism, Russian nihilist movement, anarcho-primitivism, platformism, Christian anarchists, separation of state and church, atheism, eco-anarchism, anarcho-feminism or anarcho-syndicalism.

Peter Kropotkin

I am glad the current and future generation have this documentary to look and learn from. Although there is a lot of stuff happening after 1945 being also complicated by the rise of anarcho-capitalist direction (or coup – depending) lead by Murray Rothbard (1925-1995), but that I guess is the task of another documentary maker.

Dybenko the Soviet emissar and Nestor Makhno

It is mind blowing to realize how wide spread or popular were these ideas around 1900, of gaining or loosing popularity, being transformed or playing a leading role in social movements and emancipatory avant-garde. Truly they are never disappeared and in a sense became permanent taken for granted nowdays. Even if somehow written from the end, these exceptions have never been forgotten, nor completly negated but integrated and absorbed into official history, while their initiators got mostly imprisoned or killed, it also remains a living proof that something like this existed and influenced the most basic things from the strike to the 8h working day or the weekend pause. All these examples of cooperative organization, labor movement, autonomy, of inventing and trying out alternative and experimental anti-authoritarian pedagogy models and lots of practical experiences and historical examples were basically preparing the entire society for a jump into an alternate, future post-capitalist world. Many thanks to Felix P for pointing it out to me.

Buenaventura Durutti