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This chapter focuses on anarchist pedagogy in cinema. Narrative cinema, which has traditionally conceived of the classroom as a cinematic microcosm that can encapsulate the conflicts and contradictions of childhood and adolescence, provides fertile territory for charting the ideological — and often aesthetic — vicissitudes of authoritarian, reformist, and anti-authoritarian education. The chapter then looks at how film can both reflect pedagogical currents, and even function as pedagogical practice itself. It considers “classroom films” such as Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle (1955), which is a paradigmatic example of a film in which a teacher is portrayed as a near-saintly redeemer. The chapter also examines classroom insurrections in Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) and L'Atalante (1934), as well as Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968). Finally, it discusses the dilemma of the anarchist intellectual, and addresses how anarchist pedagogy extends far beyond the confines of the classroom or academic conference. Released on the cusp of the twenty-first-century, Peter Watkins's La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) is an exemplary case study in how radical cinema can coincide with anarchist pedagogy and an ethics and aesthetics of self-emancipation.

This chapter analyzes the impact of the West German student movement on the history of fear and on emotional culture more generally. The “68ers” propagated an expressive emotional culture that partly displaced the older repressive emotional culture. The student movement celebrated the public display of emotions and enabled a new significance of emotions within political activism and for individual subjectivities. The chapter brings into focus the specific role that fear and anxiety played in shaping the political outlooks and subjectivities of student activities. While historians have often emphasized the optimism that drove the student movement, activists’ fears and disappointments resulted, in part, from their far-reaching, even utopian, ambitions. Fears also resulted from student activists’ confrontation with police and popular violence. Students’ politicization of sexuality turned personal relationships into a source of anxiety because many activists found it difficult to reconcile their political views with their private lives. Finally, the chapter analyzes conservative fears of revolution, as they were expressed by the conservative Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft that sought to contain the influence of left-wing forces within the universities. The dialectic of fear that had already shaped the interplay between democratic fears and fears of democracy in the earlier period intensified further. Revolutionary fears and fears of revolution structured the political debate in the West German 1960s and beyond.