> Did anyone see it?
>
> Overall it was decent, despte some of the annoying
> "dramatic re-enactments," like the scene where Goldman
> and Berkman are portrayed stirring up chemicals to
> make a Spy v.s Spy-type, fizzing black orb [the
> narrator came on to say they didn't use a bomb, after
> all--I suppose they had to get the image in there
> somewhere at least, though]. Also, the program implied
> that Goldman lost faith in socialism after her USSR
> exile, developing a new appreciation for America
> [which in a small sense may be true but not in the way
> the narrator implied]. No mention of the Spanish
> Revolution.
>
> Even better than the documentary, for my money, is the
> PBS Goldman website.
I thought it was pretty good, given that it was a PBS documentary and only had 90 minutes to cover Emma Goldman's life. My criticisms of the documentary are available on the Infoshop News e-mail list, but I will recap them here:
1) Should have included more excerpts from her writings and speeches. 2) Was confusing about what Emma had rejected after her stay in the Soviet Union. She had rejected her support for the Bolsheviks, not her commitment to anarchism and socialism. 3) The complete lack of a contemporary context of Emma Goldman's influence. The documentary could have spent five minutes looking at contemporary anarchism. And it could have included more actual anarchists instead of celebrity artists who like to hang out with anarchists. Which gets to another thing that the documentary didn't go into enough: her influence on the arts in America, which was alluded to several times, including the mention of Peggy Guggenheim.
Some criticisms this morning from other anarchists:
"...there was no attempt to tie in Emma's thinking on women's rights, sexual liberation, labor, etc., with her anarchist politics. One walks away with the impression of a sort of generic do-gooder and free speechist who also happened to have some weird ideas about government." -- Eric Laursen
"...where were the present-day anarchist activists - those, for example,
who've played such an important role in the global justice movement, to show that Emma's politics are alive and well? There wasn't the slightest hint that the filmmakers realize that anarchism is a live-and-well political/philosophic tradition and not some relic." -- Eric Laursen
"The principal authoritative voice in the film was Alice Wexler, who wrote a substantial two-volume bio of Emma. Wexler is a good biographer and historian, and I have a lot of respect for her research. But again, her books do Emma a disservice by removing her as much as possible from the anarchist context, instead interpreting her pretty much as a figure in a sort of generic immigrant-radical history. Anarchism, again, is viewed as an eccentricity of a prodigiously talented woman, not as a continuing tradition in which she was a vital link. The problem, of course, is that if you remove the anarchism from Emma, she does start to seem like a "mere" reformer, and the point of why anyone today should read her, except as a sort of generic "inspiring figure," is lost. Unfortunately, this is the impression the whole film gives." -- Eric Laursen
Chuck0