BURNING FRAME: A MONTHLY ANARCHIST FILM SERIES

CALLING ALL RADICAL LEFTISTS! Come join us for a welcome respite from endless organizing work. The past two years have been a whirlwind: exhausting, invigorating, and ever ripe with potential. It can be difficult to find moments of pause and reflection when in the thick of it. Especially when “it” refers to the rise of fascism on a global scale with any number of future cataclysms hovering just past the horizon. But we digress.

The films in this series (presented as double-features) have been specially chosen by anarchists for anarchists, but really anyone far left-of-center in their beliefs and actions will find much to identify with and mull over. Come for the great works of radical political filmmaking, stay for the generative discussions, or even just to commiserate about how little has fundamentally changed over the past 50 years (the span of time which the films in this series will cover). The overriding hope is that these films, and their authentic representations of successes, defeats, and the messy work of direct action will help grant us the willpower and imagination to break through cycles of repeated structures.

To butcher the title of a great film for the sake of a mildly applicable pun: “Throw away your dogma, rally in the cinema.”

REBELLION IN PATAGONIA
(aka LA PATAGONIA REBELDE)
Dir. Hector Olivera, 1974.
Argentina. 110 minutes.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29 – 7:30

REBELLION IN PATAGONIA represents a sterling work of Anarchist memorialization bravely brought to the screen by it’s director, Hector Olivera. Based on Oswaldo Bayer’s historical novel Patagonia Rebelde, about an anarcho-syndicalist labor union’s insurrectionary uprising against the Argentinian elite in the 1920s, which was banned and publicly burned in the 70’s along with the aforementioned feature film adaptation.

The film begins with an anarchist-led hotel workers’ strike so successful one forgets how the working class could ever lose sight of its inherent collective strength. But soon after the workers’ victory, cold reality swings back into sharp focus as the landowners conspire with the government to violently repress the strikers and rollback the gains made, a turn which the strikers had not foreseen. A cautionary tale for trusting state powers to uphold hard-won gains in worker’s rights.

For decades, Argentinian politics swung between the Nationalist populism of Juan Peron and a series of military coups, eventually centrally coordinated under Operation Condor, aimed at suppressing the socialist elements that made Peron so widely popular.

In 1976 the military seized power once again, ushering in a brutal 7 year dictatorship in which the film was banned, Bayer, Olivera, and several of the film’s actors were blacklisted, and Cepernic was imprisoned. In jail, he asked his warden if he deserved such cruel treatment simply for being a member of a Left-of-center party. “No, you’re not a prisoner because of your affiliation,” the warden reportedly said. “You’re a prisoner because you allowed Rebellion in Patagonia to be filmed.”

This film will be followed by a special MACC Encore Program at 10:00.