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In and against cinema. Around May ’68

Film series and talks around May 1968. Presented by Fundació Antoni Tàpies at the French Institute of Barcelona.

What makes an image political? What makes militant cinema militant? The project In and against cinema presents experimental film practices from the late 1960s that deal with some of the essential political questions that captivated France in May 1968. The series includes collectively created and directed film essays, militant anonymous short films, and films by filmmakers such as Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Chris Marker and Mario Marret, among others.

This is about images that capture the event with the urgency of real time. But above all, images impregnated with questions, investigations and rejections of their time. The presentation of a collection of film experiences ‘around May ’68’ is not only a chronological reference. It addresses the fact that a group of films and proposals share the most radical questions of that era in all their intensity.

Memory is a space for struggle: the forces of power need to control memories, especially the memories of a time that changed so many lives and reality itself. May 2008 will be the fortieth anniversary of the largest general strike in the history of France, and the last widespread insurrection in a capitalist ‘developed’ society in the second half of the twentieth century. ‘Reactive memories’ (political, media-orientated, cultural) downplay the sense of May ’68 by reducing it to a student revolt, a generational conflict, a matter of hormones, an acceleration of modernity (an explosion of hedonist individualism, liberation of lifestyles), etc. Their objective is to de-politicise the present. On the contrary, our approach to May ’68 focuses on its radical critique of representation, on the collective creation of other forms of expression, relationships and life. Much of our effort goes to bring to the present a tempestuous and conflictive memory: the search for political spaces outside, on the margins and against institutional politics.

This search for new spaces and ways of doing things did not just take place in the field of organised struggle: Action Committees, occupation of factories, street demonstrations, diffuse self-organisation. The May ’68 insurrection influenced film making in equal measure, perhaps more than any other cultural form or language. For this reason, the film cycle programmed for May-June in Seville, Barcelona and Madrid, will present a series of films, mostly from the late sixties, that take on board the problems of May ’68: How can a movement that rejects ‘the indignity of speaking for others’ – not only at the level of politics, the media and the unions, but also culturally, artistically and intellectually – express itself? What makes an image political? What makes militant cinema militant?

The title of the cycle, In and Against Cinema, taken from a text in the Internationale Situationniste No 1, is a fitting epigraph to suggest the double direction that arises from such questions and puts those experiences under strain:
Against, because they imply a deep questioning of the hegemonic film forms, models and narratives, hence the opposition movement, the critique of the prevailing models.
In, because they simultaneously affirm and widen the possibilities of the medium to document, communicate, question, join and strengthen all signs of social transformation, new forms of politicisation and the search for autonomy.

The present cycle reflects radical lines of experimentation and creation: from Loin du Vietnam – filmed in 1967 by a collective of filmmakers, including Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Joris Ivens and Jean-Luc Godard, to protest against American military intervention in Vietnam, a war whose denunciation was precisely at the roots of May ’68 – to the experiences of the Medvedkine Groups, committed to the production and realisation of militant films by the workers themselves, i.e., by those who are normally excluded from representation; from cinétracts – literally film pamphlets, anonymous mini-films, whose aim was the direct political participation in the movement – to the films of Guy Debord.

These lines are plural and include the questioning of the mechanisms and foundations of the image; the interruption of the established forms of transmission and perception, as in the films of Maurice Lemaître or Pierre Clémenti; the breaking of social barriers between subjects and worlds that institutional society deliberately keeps apart (workers, students, filmmakers, intellectuals), as was the case with the Medvedkine Groups; the practice of collective author essays and collective creation, as in the ARC and Dziga Vertov groups, or even the politics of anonymity; the setting up of alternative channels of production and distribution such as those of États Généraux du Cinéma; the investigation at the heart of film forms, from the interaction between soundtrack, text and image contesting and counteracting one another, eroding their own evidence, to the use of new editing methods, or the use of someone else’s images or images filmed by others, subjected to an exercise in critique or deviation, a procedure taken to the extreme in La société du spectacle and Un film comme les autres.

In our selection, we have chosen not to include feature films on May ’68, both those made at the time and more recent films that use it as a backdrop for their plot, invariably reduced to icons such as the barricades, slogans, graffiti and student demonstrations, seen as a prerogative of that movement. We have also excluded the enormous amount of audiovisual, television and cinema material ruled by documentary conventions that has been produced for successive commemorations of the event.

Film making around May ’68 is political not only because it documents, gives voice and/or denounces situations of oppression and struggle, but because the making, production and circulation of these films question in a constructive way well-defined and established identities, functions and social categories. Moreover, no other medium can so vividly reflect the atmosphere of May ’68 in the Latin Quarter, the public debates and re-appropriation of the streets, as do the images of Grands soirs et petits matins by William Klein; or the strong resistance of militant workers against resuming work, as does Oser lutter, oser vaincre by Jean-Pierre Thorn; or their defeat, as does La reprise du travail aux usines Wonder. These are images that belie the present representation of May ’68 as a harmless movement – stripped of violence, conflict and politics – and act as vibrant traces of the event. Undoubtedly, this is due to the fact that these images do not limit themselves to registering what took place, but try to participate actively and creatively by taking part in the events with all its social implications.

How can the memory of May ’68 not have a disruptive presence today, when such formidable business, media and political machines are defining our everyday life, monopolising our attention, directing our perception, imposing and stealing our words and images to replace them with their own? How can these films not appeal to the present, when we find their echoes in the endless contemporary searches for new ways of self-representation beyond all instrumentalization?

Indeed, as one of the texts written by États Généraux du Cinéma during the May insurrection proclaimed, ‘to make cinema is to rebel’.

David Cortés and Amador Fernández-Savater

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