Also, my Reason squib about Jens Galschiot's sculpture Survival of the Fattest is now online. The article can also boast of being censored by the Bent County Correctional Facility in Colorado.
Because he took his ideals seriously, Ward butted heads regularly with both the conventional left and the conventional right. In the '80s and early '90s, his column for New Statesman & Society was peppered with examples of the Tory government failing to live up to its rhetoric of liberty and decentralized power. At the same time, he was harshly critical of the social democratic left. In one of his most famous passages, he pointed out that
When we compare the Victorian antecedents of our public institutions with the organs of working-class mutual aid in the same period the very names speak volumes. On the one side the Workhouse, the Poor Law Infirmary, the National Society for the Education of the Poor in Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church; and, on the other, the Friendly Society, the Sick Club, the Cooperative Society, the Trade Union. One represents the tradition of fraternal and autonomous association springing up from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above.
As Stuart White notes in his tribute to Ward, the writer was
a formidible and dedicated opponent of what is often understood as the Fabian tradition. This comes across very clearly in his work on housing where he was always highly critical of state-heavy efforts, led by middle-class housing professionals, to provide housing for the working-classes. In this context, he argued for the alternative left tradition of cooperative self-help in the form of tenant cooperatives, self-build projects and squatting. He pointed repeatedly to the illogicality of local governments - often Labour-controlled - who would rather destroy unused council housing stock than allow it to be occupied by squatters.
These squatters, to be clear, were not self-righteous trustafarians seizing a private home while the owner took a holiday. They were ordinary families finding uses for resources the state had left fallow. Such self-organization was a longtime theme in Ward's work. Quoting White again: "Much to the consternation of the [postwar] Labour government, many thousands of working-class people responded to acute housing shortage by taking over and adapting disused military bases. While his comrades in the anarchist movement struggled to see the point, Colin saw this as an example of what he would later call 'anarchy in action': direct and cooperative self-help." Ward's interest in the institutions that people build from below took him to areas that radical writers rarely touched: He wrote appreciative histories and sociologies of holiday camps, allotment gardens, amateur music-making, even the street culture of urban children.
Ward had an eye for the creativity of ordinary people and the ways we use that inventive energy to transform our environments. He didn't have trouble imagining a society immersed in liberty and spontaneous order, because he knew that liberty and spontaneous order were what sustained society in the first place, even if they sometimes had to take a stunted form.
SELF-PROMOTION: I had an article in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, a fairly long piece about populism that ran in the Weekend Journal section.
I also had a column on the Reason site last week. It explains why the opposition party's State of the Union response is always lame.
Finally, the new print issue of Reason is now on its way to subscribers. I have two very brief pieces in it, one about a sculpture displayed during the Copenhagen climate talks and one about a recent graphic novel, Steven Grant and Scott Bieser's Odysseus the Rebel.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1929, it gave its Best Picture award to The Broadway Melody, a thoroughly unexceptional film. Then again, there weren't that many exceptional films in general coming out of Hollywood that year. The sound era was just beginning, which meant there were a lot of awkward pictures produced by people who basically had to learn to make a movie all over again. Even their better efforts tended to be uneven: The Love Parade is enjoyable, for example, but it has lapses in areas as basic as the pacing of the dialogue.
The result? Usually these lists are dominated by American entries, but this time just three of my top 10 -- and just five of the top 20 -- were made in the United States. And only one of those five is a feature.
1. The Man With a Movie Camera Written and directed by Dziga Vertov
The high point of the experimental Soviet cinema of the '20s. In just a few short years Stalin would be enforcing the idiotic artistic dogma of Socialist Realism and movies like this would effectively disappear.
2. My Grandmother Directed by Kote Mikaberidze Written by Mikaberidze and Giorgi Mdivani
Even before Socialist Realism came along, of course, the Soviets were censoring subversive art. This Georgian mixture of slapstick, surrealism, and anti-statist satire -- the same combo on display in Brazil and Death of a Bureaucrat -- was suppressed almost immediately and didn't reemerge until the '70s.
3. A Cottage on Dartmoor Directed by Anthony Asquith Written by Asquith, from a story by Herbert Price
A silent psychological thriller about a crime of passion and its aftermath, featuring some of the most brilliant montage sequences ever set to celluloid.
4. Hallelujah! Directed by King Vidor Written by Wanda Tuchock, Ransom Rideout, Richard Schayer, and Marian Ainslee, from a story by Vidor
The first great musical.
5. Nogent Directed by Marcel Carné with Michel Sanvoisin
A wonderful wordless documentary about a working-class weekend resort.
6. Pandora's Box Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst Written by Ladislaus Vajda, from two plays by Frank Wedekind
If I could run a TV network for just a day in December, I would broadcast this under the title The Jack the Ripper Christmas Special.
7. Un Chien Andalou Written and directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali
Buñuel would later denounce "that crowd of imbeciles who find the film beautiful and poetic when it is fundamentally a desperate and passionate call to murder."
8. Big Business Directed by James W. Horne with Leo McCarey Written by McCarey and H.M. Walker
Laurel & Hardy's guide to good customer relations.
9. The Skeleton Dance Directed by Walt Disney
Disney before it was Disneyfied.
10. The New Babylon Written and directed by Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg
Like My Grandmother, this Shostakovich-scored tale of the Paris Commune ran into trouble with the Soviet censors. Its subject may have seemed suited for Communist agitprop, but it didn't take extraordinary perception to see that the film was far more anarchist than Bolshevist at heart.
Honorable mentions:
11. Diary of a Lost Girl (Georg Wilhelm Pabst) 12. Les Mystères du Château de Dé (Man Ray) 13. Tusalava (Len Lye) 14. Hyas and Stenorhynchus (Jean Painlevé) 15. The Hoose-Gow (James Parrott) 16. Brumes d'Automne (Dimitri Kirsanoff) 17. H2O (Ralph Steiner) 18. Black and Tan (Dudley Murphy) 19. La Perle (Henri d'Ursel) 20. Everything Turns Everything Resolves (Hans Richter)
Of the movies of 1929 that I haven't seen, the one that interests me the most is John Grierson's Drifters.