Program Review

American Utopia, Firefly Productions, 1994, 56 minutes.

Most labor history documentaries, with some wonderful exceptions, are made on the extreme cheap. Important topics rendered via tiny budgets can be forgiven for mining a rather narrow vein of visual materials, sometimes even including well-known labor photos lifted directly from readily available books such as Schnapper's American Labor.

Fortunately, American Utopia suffers from no such problem. Instead, the viewer of this exploration of the story of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony is treated to a rich collection of archival stills and graphics, gathered by videomaker Beverly Lewis from all over the country. Many of the visuals were personally provided by participants in the colony experiment who were interviewed in the videotape, and thus have never before been exposed to the scrutiny of mass distribution.

The Llano experiment in Utopian socialism has been detailed before, most recently in Greenstein, Lennon, and Rolfe's Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles, and in the opening pages of Mike Davis' City of Quartz, where it sets up the book's dystopic portrait of present-day Los Angeles with a melancholy glimpse at the ruins of what might have been. But no one has sought to tell the tale in film or video before.

American Utopia interviews these and other scholars, along with a surprising number of surviving members of the two colonies (the first established in Antelope Valley, California, and the next, longer-lasting one in southwest Louisiana.) These images of an era, interwoven with the testimony of those who lived and studied it, lift the curtain over a vanished worldview and its realization, for a brief span of twenty-five years, in the community of people who tried to bring it into being. We see scenes of cooperative life as it blossomed in the colony's economy (agriculture, canning, fisher hatchery, metal working, printing), politics, and administration (the running of the colony sought its level between full-bore democratic anarchy and authoritarian, one-man rule) and social life (the dance hall, study circles, schools split between book-learning and working the colony's enterprises, and lots of musical and theatrical performances.)

Along the way the video provides a brief but serviceable biography of Job Harriman, the colony's founding light and almost mayor of Los Angeles on the Socialist ticket in 1911. American Utopia also comes up with an interesting explanation of the staying power of the colony in what might reasonably have been expected to be a hostile second home in the deep south: a high percentage of ex-wobblies left over from the region's recently collapsed timber industry.