From the analysis of the reception of the film phenomenon by the libertarian world, the present study seeks to investigate one of the issues still pending today of a careful attention by the historiography on the libertarian world: the heterogeneous and diverse nature of this social movement.
Thus, this research raises how, far from representing a closed cultural and social reality, the libertarian world showed great permeability and a remarkable ability to adapt to social and cultural changes. In this sense, the cinematographic phenomenon, intimately related to the process of emergence and consolidation of a mass society, was the subject of a careful attention by the Catalan libertarians and, especially, by the younger elements, who , as a counterpart to their grief at union framing, they tended to exercise their militancy through publicity and journalism.
In the framework of the research project “Press and union organization in the anarchist movement” we have observed the reception of the cinematographic phenomenon by anarcho-syndicalism focusing especially on the field of the press and publicism. Avoiding the usual practice of cataloging and classifying headers and publications of press and communication studies, we have placed the question of the heterogeneity of the libertarian world at the center of our approach in order to approach those spaces and dynamics of libertarian sociability in the that the younger generations had a special role. We want to make explicit the diverse and heterogeneous characteristic of anarchism all referring here to this social movement with the broader term of “libertarian world”, which we believe helps to better understand a cultural reality so diverse and heterogeneous as to incorporate forms of organization and militancy as diverse as unions, “affinity groups” or journalistic spokesmen, and in which ideological ascriptions were so diverse as to allow subtle distinctions between “anarcho-syndicalists”, “anarchists”, “rationalists”, “libertarians”, etc. In this sense, we also want to indicate that in our study we have devoted special attention to the issue of affinity groups, which constituted the backbone of this complex organizational and ideological framework.
The question of the reception of the cinematographic phenomenon by anarcho-syndicalism is a good example to observe the libertarian perception of the emergence and consolidation of a mass society and the emerging role of youth in this process, both in its articulation in the process of diversification of the cultural market as well as its political framing. We consider that the libertarian world, far from constituting a closed cultural and social space, was able to show, thanks to its diversity, a great ability to adapt to social and cultural changes. In this sense, our research aims to overcome one of the great dark points still existing today on anarcho-syndicalism, since despite the large volume of historiographical production available on this social movement, a good part has been determined by ideological considerations of little correspondence with the sociological reality. Thus, we have placed the question of the internal diversity of anarcho-syndicalism in the axis of our approach, to pay special attention to the close relationship maintained between publicism and libertarian journalism and the articulation of the complex network of affinity groups. At this point we consider that although the libertarian press has always been an important source of information for the study of anarcho-syndicalism and the workers’ movement, they have not yet been the object of careful attention in itself as a journalistic phenomenon. Similar considerations deserve the bulk of cinematographic historiography, which, in its scant attention to the cinematographic journalistic criticism of the time, has also made clear its dependence on aprioristic ideological considerations.
