Mayhem, disorder, racism. Many words were bandied about to describe the riots across the United Kingdom this summer. Anarchy was another. No surprise there: anarchism has long been associated with Molotov violence, bombs and barricades, feral youths sporting mohicans. Macclesfield-based filmmaker Brandon Spivey’s Crass: The Sound of Free Speech tells a rather different story. It deals with Crass, an extraordinarily powerful and influential art collective and punk band that formed near Epping in Essex at the end of the 1970s.
The Sex Pistols sang about anarchy in the UK. Crass lived it. Their base was Dial House, a 16th-century cottage that served as an open-all-hours commune at which travellers from around the world pitched up. Their members—among them Penny Rimbaud (who’d been expelled from two public schools), Steve Ignorant (from working-class Dagenham) and Eve Libertine—performed using minimal stage lighting to avoid the cult of personality in which rock music traded. Their shows were often held at community halls whose tables teemed with leaflets promoting vegetarianism and green politics. Just as Public Enemy’s Chuck D would later call hip-hop “black people’s CNN”, Crass operated as a form of alternative media.
Crass took design seriously. Their grabby, collage-heavy sleeve art, by Gee Vaucher, echoed the photomontages of John Heartfield and the stencilled graffiti of 1970s street radicalism. Their live shows were backlit with ferociously plunderphonic Super 8 films by Mick Duffield. For the most part, Spivey doesn’t mimic that aesthetic; many scenes of Rimbaud talking in Dial House are more pensive than pugilistic. Spivey’s focus is on the band’s 1978 debut album, The Feeding of the 5000: staff at the Irish record-pressing plant believed the lyrics of one of its songs were blasphemous and refused to manufacture it. The band replaced the track with two minutes of silence, released it later on their own label, and spent the next six years blazing a trail for legions of what came to be known as anarcho-punk bands.
Time has not tamed Crass’s music. It’s still a tsunami of noise, agitprop and musique concrète. The lyrics—seething and questioning, goading listeners to distrust “consensual reality”—want us to think that paranoia is productive, necessary even. Perhaps, given the reach of platform CEOs today, they’re right. It makes sense that a 350-page pictorial history of Crass came out this year, and that they’re currently the subject of a multi-gallery retrospective in New York.
Crass want us to think that paranoia is productive, necessary even
What, I couldn’t help wondering while watching Spivey’s documentary, would a film season devoted to British anarchism look like? One approach might be to focus on key figures. Adam Kossoff’s The Anarchist Rabbi (2014) is a meditation, voiced by Steven Berkoff, on German-born Rudolf Rocker who came to east London at the end of the 19th century and, in what has been called the “golden years” of Jewish anarchism, not only campaigned against sweatshop practices and antisemitism, but edited a Yiddish-language anarchist publication. He was interned as an enemy alien in 1914, but, at a celebration to mark his 80th birthday, was hailed by no less than Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein.
Huw Wahl’s To Hell With Culture (2014) is a valuable portrait of Herbert Read, First World War hero, poet, philosopher and one of the founders of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, who was also known for declaring, “To hell with the artist”. Quiet, tweedy, bow-tied: he fronted as a grandee, but his instincts were anything but. He thought art needed to be taken off its pedestal, that it needed to be integrated with daily life, and that “all production should be for use, and not for profit”.
Some anarchists live by the credo that another world is possible. Colin Ward (1924-2010) believed that anarchism is already here. In Mike Dibb’s Personally Speaking (2009), the director, best known for his TV series Ways of Seeing (1972) presented by the art critic John Berger, brings Ward and writer Roger Deakin into conversation. Boyish and long-memoried, Ward discusses his influential books about allotments, self-build housing, holiday camps and children’s play in which he sought to show that anarchism was “like a seed beneath the snow”, less a theoretical precept than a spirit of mutualism that had been stifled by the rise of the welfare state.
It may be set across the Channel, but no season on British anarchism would be complete without La Commune: Paris, 1871 (2000) by this country’s most consistently heretical director, Peter Watkins. Nearly six hours long, it’s a rigorous, sometimes agonistic reenactment—using mostly non-professional actors—of the debates within the much-feted but short-lived revolutionary government in 19th-century France. It’s as intense as Crass—and just as bracing.
