Submitted by LostYonder in AskRaddle
ziq wrote (edited )
Ben Cash is raising his six children off the grid in rural Washington. They live in a sort of yurt with adjacent tree houses and other buildings, they hunt and farm all of their own food, and they celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday like it’s Christmas. Ben is the sort of ideological-minded communist who hates the greater capitalist culture of America and teaches his children five languages as well as a doctrine to stick it to the man.
After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gives his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness.
An impressionable teenage girl from a dead-end town and her older greaser boyfriend embark on a killing spree in the South Dakota badlands. Depicts the coldness, boredom and detached isolation of civilization.
Punishment Park (or watch the Full Movie)
When the state serves as the guarantor of free speech, human rights, and social justice, the game is rigged from the onset. Thus, what is needed is a structural challenge to the success of the system.
Featuring amateur actors and shot with hand-held cameras, the film’s confrontational approach provokes a visceral reaction as it stages arrests, tribunals, debates, and the murderous “game” at its center.
In this dystopic version of the 1970s, under title 2 of the Internal Security Act (passed by Congress in 1950 and most recently invoked against Chelsea Manning in 2010), President Nixon has consolidated all domestic governmental authority within the executive branch and instructed the police and military to detain and punish any and all dissent.
Dissident trials are foregone conclusions, and afterwards they are given the choice of long prison terms or the opportunity of gaining their freedom by surviving the guantlet of running fifty-six miles through the desert while being hunted by police and national guard troops.
The film crosscuts between one group attempting to traverse the “park” and one group still on trial. In this way, the film illustrates the theories of the testimonies through images of the practices of the dissidents “in the field.” From the start, we know the authorities will always win, not because of individuals, though, but because the maintenance of the institutions is paramount.
The roughness and direct address of issues of race, class, gender, and imperialism mark Punishment Park as an extremely valuable relentless, didactic composition.
Spanish Civil War. Four women join in the fight against the Nationalist government and right-wing elements of the Church. Pilar is a militant feminist. Floren is her comrade in arms. Charo is a sex worker radicalized by the war and her recognition of the gender and sexuality inequalities that permeate the social structure.
Depicts the anarchist brigade in the Spanish Civil War; where men and women fight side by side and elect their own leaders when necessary.
Matewan is an ambivalent union film that stages a reenactment of the 1920 coal miner’s strike in Matewan, West Virginia, including the final gunfight between the townspeople and the anti-union thugs that left seven people dead.
The film depicts the complex, dynamic intersections among race, class, ethinicity, and gender involved in twentieth-century labor organizing.
Feminist, queer, science fiction. A futuristic image of USAmerica reborn as a socialist democracy pushed toward anarchist activation by women’s pirate radio.
In New York City, ten years after the peaceful socialist revolution, two feminist radio stations—one led by a white lesbian and one led by a soft-spoken black woman—give voice to the shortcomings of the revolution, which some argue has led to a dystopian system of governmental control and aggrevated patriarchal abuse.
They demand the right for self-rule from the elites and blow up the radio tower atop the World Trade Center to end all future hegemonic media messaging. The film emphasizes alternative aesthetics, direct (rather than representative) democracy, and women’s roles in what is deemed as “necessary violence.”
A poor Midwest family is forced off their land. They travel to California, suffering the misfortunes of the homeless in the Great Depression.
A neorealist-inspired collaborative endeavor to dramatize the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Companty in Grant County, New Mexico, the black and white film deploys actual miners and their families and is constructed around the tensions between the work place strikes and the home front difficulties as gender and hierachical situations are fractured and shifted by intersecting responsibilities.
Although the film is a remarkably collective story—of the miners and their communal struggles to work freely and live the lives they have made—it also uses the microcosm of Esperanza and Ramon’s tale to focus on the gendered aspects of resistance.
Esperanza, who narrates the film, is pregnant with their third child; she at first supports Ramon’s leadership in the workers’ organization but quickly challenges his patriarchal abuse at home. After the striking men are denied the right to continue their collective action, the women of the town take up their places in the picket line, marching for the rights and recognition of all the workers.
Thus, Salt of the Earth is one of the first modern films to directly align feminist and working-class issues without subverting one hierarchy to the other.
Set in the South two years before the Civil War, Django Unchained stars Jamie Foxx as Django, a slave whose brutal history with his former owners lands him face-to-face with German-born bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz. Empowering revenge fantasy.
A documentary of the aerial bombing by the Philadelphia police of the MOVE Organization that resulted in the deaths of several children and destroyed two entire city blocks.
Deacons for Defense (or watch the Full Movie)
Biographical film about the rise of the early armed Black self-defense movement "Deacons for Defense and Justice" in Tuscaloosa, AL, which inspired Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party
Ex-Black Panther returns to his hometown in Philadelphia after the Party was disbanded by COINTELPRO.
Comedic tale of workers who suffer endless indignities and humiliations in their soulless workspace. For Peter, stuck in his cookie-cutter apartment with paper-thin walls and IKEA furniture, every day is worse than the one before it -- so every day is the worst of his life. The workers decide to rebel against their bourgie boss.
Dramatic exploration into the roots of race hatred in America from the perspectives of a white nationalist and his little brother.
V for Vendetta takes place in an alternate vision of Britain in which a corrupt and abusive totalitarian government has risen to complete power. During a threatening run in with the secret police, an unassuming young woman named Evey is rescued by a vigilante named V - a caped figure both articulate and skilled in combat. V embodies the principles of rebellion from an authoritarian state, donning a mask of vilified would-be terrorist of British history Guy Fawkes and leading a revolution sparked by assassination and destruction.
The life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who chronicled the Russian Revolution in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. Features Emma Goldman as a character.
A celebration of anti-social behavior, illegalism and the rejection of consumerism.
Animated:
The film is about a fox who steals food each night from three mean and wealthy farmers. They are fed up with Mr. Fox's theft and try to kill him, so they dig their way into the foxes' home, but the animals are able to work together to outwit the farmers.
A young boy and his little sister struggle to survive in Japan during World War II.
A young Iranian girl experiences the Islamic Revolution when the fundamentalists first take power--forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. She cleverly outsmarts the "social guardians" and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden, while living with the terror of government persecution and the Iran/Iraq war. Then Marjane's journey moves on to Austria where she has to combat being equated with the religious fundamentalism and extremism she fled her country to escape.
ziq wrote (edited )
The first 2 on the list best reflect my worldview. A rejection of civilization and things and a yearning for freedom away from authority.
There's also a wiki if anyone wants to add summaries and/or trailers to it:
edmund_the_destroyer wrote (edited )
While Fight Club rejects consumerism, I don't think it's a good anarchist film. I don't want to spoil the story for those that haven't seen it, but our anti-consumerist hero (anti-hero? protagonist?) has absolute dictatorial control of the organization he creates to attack consumerism. Clearly that's not anarchist. And in the end he's defeated by someone who is alienated by consumerism but does not reject it or contemporary society to nearly the same level that he does.
If anything, I'd call the film a dark comedy with a mild criticism of consumerism.
ziq wrote
I don't recall calling it an anarchist film. But they blow up the central bank and wipe out all debt so it's pretty much the best thing ever to happen in mainstream cinema.
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