#horizontality

Anarchists and Neo-anarchists: Horizontalism and Autonomous Spaces

It is not uncommon, particularly in North America, to see anarchism defined as an ideology rooted in ‘direct democracy’, consensus decision making, and the maintenance of ‘horizontal’ (i.e., ‘non-hierarchical’) social relations, particularly in autonomous zones or public spaces.

This idea of anarchism is unusual in that it places at the centre of its definition an adherence to very specific forms of procedure and interpersonal behaviour while downplaying the political ends a ‘horizontal’ movement should be trying to establish. From this perspective, reclaiming public space as an opportunity to hold non-hierarchical public assemblies, where we can hammer out decisions by consensus, is, in itself, ‘anarchist’ – whatever the result of such processes.

(Esp) Por mi y por todos mis compañeros. Solidaridad - Esfuerzo - Horizontalidad.

Feminists, we can learn a lot from the Horizontalidad movement

here's a link to a pdf of a book that directly quotes interviews with many people about how Horizontalidad has been transforming movement in Venezuela

The trailer for Unrueh (Unrest) is embedded above. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I look forward to watching when it is available to me. It’s compelling for many reasons, some of which are the watchmaking, the labor organizing, the history of anarchism, and the way the film was made. Here are two long clips from an excellent interview with the director Cyril Schäublinby Soren Hough to give you an idea of what I mean:

The idea of decentralizing these famous figures comes through in the filmmaking both narratively (Kropotkin and Josephine both say they are not protagonists in dialogue) and in the actual framing of individual scenes where use wide shots that literally decenter the characters. “Unrest” has this almost Altman- or Haneke-like voyeuristic perspective.

It’s also just the way I like to make films and the way that I like to watch [them]. It goes a long way back that I came up with this way of creating an image so that when you watch the movie, you are aware that you’re watching a movie. It’s transparent that it’s a made up thing. Maybe this could sound Brechtian, but it’s not really. And also to give liberty [to the audience] of what to choose from this big tableau image, and what to do with it—but also to give the people who appear in the film, which are all non-professional actors, space to just do what they what they do and not be too [restrictive to them].

Kind of the exact opposite of Kubrick. He would keep one particular shot over and over again until he got what he eventually wanted.

He worked with actors, and I work with people. It’s very fragile, and delicate. I have to work a lot with them and tell them "don’t act" or "don’t play." But then they are suddenly just doing it. It’s like a situationist approach.

And of course, situationists have a connection to the anarchist movement, as well. It sounds like your natural aesthetic instinct tied well into this particular story where you, as you say, have this big name in “Unrest”—Peter Kropotkin. He’s not in a huge amount of the movie, he doesn’t have that many lines, he’s not a central character, and it’s certainly not a biopic.

The guy who acts as Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) is a very avid Kropotkin guy. I mean, he’s really into him. And he said to me at the end, "I didn’t say that much!" But he told me the way we were doing the film, and how the film was organized, and how we talked to each other, he felt [it took a] mutual aid approach. That was really interesting for me.

Could you elaborate on what he meant by that?

Finding out together how to [tell this story]. Just simple gestures. I mean, we were cooking for each other. There’s a lot of help involved now in filmmaking: people made his hair, his beard. They helped him with the clothes, the microphone. It was very important for me to have a gentle, open feeling between people, and that we could talk in the breaks.

It’s unusual, because I think filmmaking is one of those places where there’s a presumption that it has to be run in a quite clear, hierarchical manner, but it sounds like you were able to be more collaborative.

A lot of people came to me because this was the first big film that I made. The first film we made for 60,000 francs—only friends acted in it and it was very low budget. With this film, we had much more. So we had people who worked professionally for 30 years come to us and say, "Oh my God, this was the kindest set we’ve ever seen. How do you do it? What’s happening?" It was funny. Everybody thought it was really nice. For me, it was really tough, because it’s always tough to make a film as a directing person. Just really intense. But it was nice. Good feelings.

It sounds like even if it was difficult for you, you made it a good environment for other folks. Earlier, you mentioned cadence, the sense of rhythm of working life. And obviously this is a ubiquitous motif in "Unrest," where you have ticking clocks, stopwatches, the winding of the camera. For my part, it seemed to reflect the mechanical nature of industrial society, but also this sense of social progression. Could you talk a bit more about what these ideas mean to you?

I think it was something that fascinated me with watchmaking. Because it’s a very simple machine, you know, that creates two events, the tick and the tock [from] which you can count and compare to other events. And it’s crazy how we integrated this machine, or industrial time, into our bodies. We have a feeling [that] ten minutes have passed by. We really think it’s 4:30. We believe it’s true. It’s so concrete. And I think this is interesting, because it’s such a construction. It’s so made up. With this film, I really try to show the construction of this machine. The four different time [zones the watchmakers had to keep track of] were real, but it’s absurd from an outsider’s point of view. I think if that is a construction, other capitalist mythologies are also constructions. And I think it’s important not to forget that, that we live in a made [world] and not an ultimate finished truth or anything.

That’s one of the things I find really interesting about the film. As you say, narratively, it’s not about Kropotkin or any of the characters in particular. But it is thematically about Kropotkin’s ideas. Kropotkin, contra Karl Marx or Adam Smith or even some other anarchists, believed in the abolition of any kind of wage labor whatsoever—that there was no way to meaningfully compensate somebody’s labor, to quantify it in such a way that you can pay them a wage. In "Unrest," the exact opposite is happening. You have this constant refrain about wages being paid for particular amounts of time and for particular amounts of work. The incongruity of that notion is really laid bare.

Yeah, of course. There’s an interesting thing that we did that in the end didn’t [make it] into the film. But one of the first demands of the anarchist union in this town was that they wanted to be paid for the time when they were not allowed to work. They were like, "We want to get money for the Sundays that you don’t let us work because of your religious conviction. Or Christmas." This demand completely shows this whole thing is crazy, no? Who can say when you work and for what, when, and how?

Another aspect that came up quite a bit in “Unrest” was this idea about photography and portraiture. Throughout the movie, the authorities are trying to document the town through photos, and the police are constantly trying to move anarchists out of the shot as if they’re not part of the town, or they’re not important enough to record. The local amateur photographer is perfectly happy to photograph them, but the official authorities exclude them. Meanwhile, the anarchists are trading photos of famous revolutionary figures as if they were baseball cards.

Yeah, they really did [trade and sell] pictures of martyrs. They were selling pretty well, I guess. First, I thought this idea of who can create objective reality, or say this is true, this is our village, this is how we organize society in the beginning of the nation state, is interesting. With photography, that was funny and strange to me. Who can say, "We’ll take a picture of this town, this is how it looks"? And then they print postcards and there are no women on it, only men, or no people at all. This made sense to me to show. And of course, this idea of the anarchists to create a parallel public space, or to kind of hack into these new technologies. It was this attempt to create an anarchist identity, or an anarchist community, with technological means—with photography, there was a clear strategy, and of course with the telegraph. There’s this bit in the movie [that came about when] Florian Eitel found out that many of the factory directors and owners were subscribing to anarchist newspapers, because they were much better connected internationally than the normal press."

[...]

So some of the people in the film actually are watchmakers themselves?

Quite a few. Yeah. The main actor, Josephine (Clara Gostynski), is an architect. And she really likes Kropotkin, as well, and Simone Weil, and she spent a lot of time with one of the other actors who explained to her the mechanics. As an architect, she really could build on that.

The nationalist versus anarchist perspective in “Unrest” is most obvious when they’re running the two lotteries in parallel, one managed by the industrialist and the other by the anarchist community as a fundraiser. Later, when they’re voting, there’s a nice illustration of something that Errico Malatesta talks about, which is essentially that you have this direct marriage between capital in the state which necessarily excludes certain people (usually the powerless, the poor) from participating in governance. With all these ideas in mind, we’re in a moment where we’re seeing a revitalization of the labor movement across the globe. Unions across the United States, strikes in the UK and Europe, all in response to extreme societal precarity. Where do you see this film fitting into the current discourse about nationalism versus internationalism, workers and the state?

Big question. I wonder if internationalism is still a word that will affect us because nations are a concept that I don’t think will prevail. I don’t think it will make sense, really. But I think this is not for us or for the film to explain. I think this is just obvious. And I think our close surroundings will become much stronger—our experience of neighborhoods and direct mutual aid. And I think with cyberspace, the concept of nation and what you should have in common with all these people will fade at one point, I’m sure. There’s a lot of open question marks. [laughs]

I think also what’s really important is how we organize information. I think that is the main thing for me right now, maybe also with this film. Like [the question the workers face] in the movie, do you want to reenact a medieval battlefield? Or do you want to reenact the Paris Commune? This is a question we’re also [facing] right now. What information do we take and reproduce and turn into reality?"