The Tragedy of History: Peter Watkins's La Commune (original) (raw)
Related papers
Post-1995 French cinema: Return of the social, return of the political?
Modern & Contemporary France, 2003
The most striking tendency in French cinema from the mid-1990s onwards was the return of the social, a return which signalled the re-emergence of an overtly committed cinema. Despite its ambiguities, the mobilisation of the cinéastes in defence of the sans-papiers in 1997 was clearly part of this repoliticisation. From the leading role the filmmakers temporarily assumed through their spontaneous launch of a petition and through their place just behind the sans-papiers themselves on the Paris demonstration, one might be tempted to conclude that the world of cinema was playing a leading role in the rebirth of large-scale political protest. 1 However, a more measured evaluation of a broader context would suggest the conclusion that it was the mass mobilisations of 1995 which signalled a change of the socio-political climate in France, and which created the conditions for the rebirth of a committed cinema and for subsequent mobilisations such as that around the sans-papiers. The 1995 revolt itself contained clear echoes of 1968, not least by its size. Like the celebrated événements, it was driven essentially by the base, escaping attempts to control it from above; furthermore, it did not lack a utopian dimension (as evidenced by its slogan 'Tous ensemble!' challenging the individualism of an apparently triumphant neo-liberalism). It is thus tempting to make links between post-1995 cinema and radical post-1968 film. However, the 1995 mobilisation, essentially a defensive reflex, was not 1968, and the type of cinema that it helped to generate would be very different, requiring a different approach and framework of interpretation in order to pin down its specificity. It is this specificity that this article will attempt to trace, asking more particularly if, from a political point of view, this
Heritage, history and ‘new realism’: French cinema in the 1990s
Modern & Contemporary France, 1998
A number of key events in the 1990s have helped shape the decade's cinema. The first of these is the conjuncture of the GATT negotiations (culminating in 1993) and the ascendancy of heritage cinema to mainstream dominance in French production at the expense of popular genres such as comedy and the polar. The second is the attempted return of the auteur through the influential 1994 television series ‘Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge’. Finally, overlapping to some extent with the return of the auteur, is the arrival of a new generation of film‐makers whose political impact in the call for civil disobedience of February 1997 has undoubtedly affected the way in which the French view the films of this younger generation of directors.
The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film Since 1995 by Martin O’Shaughnessy
The relationship of cinema to politics has a rich and chequered history, effectively dictating the form of many of cinema’s most vibrant configurations (Russian cinema in the wake of the 1917 revolution, Italian neorealism after the Second World War...). The real stakes of the affair however were perhaps most clearly spelt out in France in the heady days following May ’68, the ‘red years’ that bore witness not only to the very real sub sumption of film under politics, but also the gradual elaboration of a critical approach to cinema which under stood that, at least in terms of ideology, “every film is political”.
The Power of Political, Militant, 'Leftist' Cinema. Interview with Jacques Rancière
2013
In this interview, Jacques Rancière tackles specific questions about politics, aesthetics and cinema, presenting explanations that may help to orientate readers through the though of the French thinker. The several periods characterising his work since the 1970s and, mainly from the publication of Proletarian Nights in 1981: his supposed ‘aesthetic turn’ – from workers’ history or political theory to aesthetics, which was always present since his first Works, theory, art and politics from the point of view of the ‘gaps of cinema’, the concept of the ‘politics of the amateur’ and its possible application in other arts, the distinction between the Brechtian paradigm (Group Dziga Vertov, Medvedkine) and the post-Brechtian paradigm (Straub-Huillet), as well as the relationship between ‘filmic language’ and the political struggles or the possible distinction between European cinema (the mythological order) and the American one (the order of the legendary), questions that he has addressed...
Nationalism and the cinema in France. Political mythologies and film events, 1945-1995
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2015
Hugo Frey opens his book Nationalism and the cinema in France by positioning it as complementary to the rise of scholarship on the transnational dimensions of cinema. Although he sees transnational and national cinema as two sides of the same coin that are often interwoven, Frey concentrates on the latter, thereby focusing on France in the period 1945-1995. The aim of the book is twofold. On the one hand, Frey aims to discern the ‘political myths’ (p. 10, in keeping with Christopher Flood’s Political myth: a theoretical introduction, 1996) or ideological values of the narratives that films can incorporate, thereby looking in particular for ‘nationalistic subtexts’ (p. 4) in French films. At the methodological level, this implies a textual film analysis that is focused primarily on film narratives. On the other hand, Frey puts forward the concept of the ‘film event’ (p. 11, in keeping with Marco Ferro’s Cinéma et histoire, 1993) or the societal interactions that films can evoke. In this respect, he aims to examine how the reception of specific films is ‘coloured by nationalist discourses’ (p. 4). Methodologically, this implies a historical reception analysis of the public discourse surrounding the selected films. The in-depth analysis of an impressive number of both mainstream and specialist press writings is, without doubt, one of the main achievements of this book. Frey is at his best when describing and analyzing the public discourse surrounding the films (e.g. Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (1966), Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983) and many others), thereby providing interesting insights into the societal meaning of the films and the place of cinema in French public debates. According to the title and the two main goals of the book, one would expect a thorough discussion of the debates around the highly contested concepts of nation, nationalism, nation-building and national identity. Nevertheless, the book only briefly describes ‘the national idea’ as ‘a modern construct’ and France as an ‘imagined community’ (in keeping with Benedict Anderson’s well-known phrase) to which cinema can contribute (p. 7). Frey further adheres to Michel Winock’s distinction between a Republican imaginary of France as ‘socially inclusive and founded on the notion that citizenship is about a loyalty to the constitution’ and an organic or counter-revolutionary imaginary of France, which is based on ‘a perceived set of cultural values (…) and ethnic and cultural traditions and practice’ (p. 8). This short theoretical positioning leaves many conceptual questions unanswered; these include the basic use of the term ‘nationalism’ and its relation to the term ‘nation’, which is mostly used in the sense of a ‘country’. Also, the book is not embedded in the academic debate on the relationship between nationalism and cinema, and although Frey mentions authors like Jean-Michel Frodon, Ginette Vincendeau and Susan Hayward, who have elaborated on issues concerning the national question and cinema in France, minimal attention is given to discussions with these authors. Notwithstanding this lack of interaction with the existing academic debates, as well as some typographical inaccuracies (e.g. ‘Ernst Gellner’ (p. 7), ‘the Lumières brothers from Lyons’ (p. 24)), Nationalism and the cinema in France offers an original and meticulously researched historical investigation of a highly interesting selection of French cinema culture. The originality of the book is, for example, clearly exemplified by the first chapter, which gives a fresh reading of François Truffaut’s La nuit Américaine (1973); Agnès Varda’s one hundred years of cinema commemoration film Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma (1995) and other films about films (including critical and even sarcastic works by Jean-Luc Godard and Bertrand Blier), which have, for the most part, been previously interpreted in cinephilic terms rather than as celebrations of the greatness of France as the home of cinema. One of the merits of this book is indeed the revelation of how subtle and very often unnoticed forms of nation-building can be present in a modern society, which Frey rightly links to Michael Billig’s concept of ‘banal nationalism’. Chapter two, which addresses how a selection of French films has mediated national history (particularly wartime resistance), and chapter three, on the nationalist subtexts of (mainly the reception of) Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (1966) and other melodramas from the 1960s and 1970s, complete the first part of the book, which offers an analysis of how cinema has contributed, often in subtle and sophisticated ways, to discourses of French grandeur, pride and glory. The second part of the book consists of four chapters that focus on more negatively defined and often much more explicit and essentialist nationalistic discourses concentrating on the role of non-French ‘others’ (what Frey refers to as ‘hard nationalism’). Frey begins with an examination of the anti-Americanism that runs through the French protests against economic and trade agreements that are seen to threaten French cinema culture, whereby he notices that such anti-Americanism is much less (explicitly) present in individual films. The following chapter scrutinizes how certain types of films (particularly action films) ‘perpetuated patriotic and defensive colonialist myths and stereotypes’ (p. 129), after which he focuses on the public controversy in France around films referring to the Algerian War of Independence (particularly Gillo Pontecorvo’s La bataille d'Alger (1966)). Next, Frey discusses anti-Semitic elements in French films and cinema culture, with special attention to the short period in 1989 when director Claude Autant-Lara was elected as a member of the European Parliament for the far-right Front National and caused controversy with his anti-Semitic statements. The final chapter of the book examines the extreme-right sympathies of Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot and Gérard Blain and the reactionary protests against Martin Scorcese’s The last temptation of Christ (1988). By focusing upon the extreme-right in these last two chapters, Frey offers an original and most timely analysis of the Front National’s relationship with cinema. As in the previous chapters, this analysis insightfully illustrates the pivotal role that films can play in society.
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2008
This article considers the part played by recent documentary cinema in France in constructing an integrated-rather than a fragmented-image of the French nation. Suggesting that this may be part of an international trend in documentary-making, it starts from the observation that dominant media discourse in France, along with the critically acclaimed fiction film movement of the 'cinéma de banlieue', has perpetuated an image of these cités peripheral to many French cities as threatening spaces adrift of the national community and emblematic of France's postmodern crisis of identity. Focusing on three documentaries about La Courneuve, a typically pilloried cité to the northeast of Paris, it argues that the ordinariness of the lives they convey, along with the documentarists' emphasis on the continuing penetration of cité space by State institutions and processes, and their insertion of supposedly alien spaces into a continuous narrative of memory and culture, effectively treats geography, history and culture in a way that calls into question the externalizing dominant discourse. Although limited by their lack of appeal to a mass audience that prefers the violence and spectacle of narrative cinema complicit with dominant representations of the banlieues as violent, dangerous spaces, these documentaries-and French documentary cinema of the late 1990s in general-offer images that de-essentialize the banlieue myth and challenge the image of a French nation in continuous crisis.
The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax
JCMS, 2023
Reading Daniel Fairfax's The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973), a spirited, brilliantly researched, and cogently written reevaluation of the militant period of the world's most famous French-language fi lm magazine, is to be reminded of a time when fi lm theory, practice, and politics were conceived as one. The year 1968 has long been mythologized in France as a rupture that brought the country to the brink of revolution and radicalized a generation; it also transformed French fi lm criticism into a political enterprise above all through the eff orts of Cahiers du cinéma. While the narrative of Cahiers du cinéma's revolution from an avatar of postwar cinephilia, which launched the careers of François Truff aut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette as part of the French New Wave, into a radical organ of ideological struggle by the end of the 1960s is well known, it has only been available in piecemeal fashion to Anglophone readers. Fairfax not only synthesizes preexisting literature on the subject in French and English but also provides the opportunity to assess anew the theoretical nuances of this attempt to create a Marxist materialist theory of cinema and society. To this end, Fairfax addresses three key questions about Cahiers du cinéma's political project. First, how did it attempt to intervene in its contemporary historical moment? Second, how did it help shape the