The Aerial Anarchists

The Aerial Anarchists is a 1911 British silent science fiction film directed by Walter R. Booth. It is the last of three films in Booth’s series about futuristic aerial warfare, following Aerial Torpedo and Aerial Submarine. Together, these three films form the first science fiction series made in the United Kingdom. The plot involves a fleet of airships from an unidentified country attacking London.

No footage of the film is known to survive; all details come from the original catalog synopsis by Kineto Film Studios. The film shows a bombing and its aftermath across London, including the bombing of St. Paul’s Cathedral and a railway disaster where a train plunges into a chasm.

Airships serve as the “engine of destruction” in the film. The Kineto Film Catalogue describes it as a thrilling and amazing picture that depicts the horrors of warfare carried out with aviation, the latest mechanical development. It calls the film a series of thrills, with the most extraordinary scenes being the bombardment of St. Paul’s Cathedral from an aeroplane and the train leaping into a chasm, staged so realistically that audiences would be filled with amazement and mystification.

Aviation film historian Michael Paris, in From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism, and Popular Cinema (1995), linked The Aerial Anarchists to Jules Verne’s novels. He noted the paradox that the flying machine could be a powerful agent of civilization and progress, but in the wrong hands, it could also become a terrifying engine of destruction that would change the nature of warfare.