The Sixties Redux.
Forsyth, Scott
"Everybody believed that the revolution was around the
corner"
Apres mai
Free Angela and all Political Prisoners
Loin du Vietnam
This year's Festival offered an extraordinary opportunity to
cinematically tour the cultural and political landscape of the sixties,
legendary decade of mass radicalization and challenge, both to everyday
capitalism in the advanced world and to global imperialism everywhere.
Those dizzying days of protest, war, violence and debate generated the
great ambitions of the new social movements whose achievements so
dramatically altered our cultural and social world since that epochal
moment. Just as much, our times are marked by the limitations,
integration and defeats of those movements. Indeed, the sixties have
never really gone away, mocked and trivialized by the media, still the
target for the vituperative condemnation and programmatic backlash of
the Right, from Reagan to Sarkozy. But still, as these films, illustrate
forcefully, an inspiration for contemporary hopes for rejuvenated
radical politics.
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Signally, it was the events of May 68 in France that most returned
social transformation in the advanced capitalist world as a real
political possibility, after the crushing of thirties and forties
radicalism in the reactionary quiescence of the Cold War fifties. The
outstanding new film by Olivier Assayas is conceived in and suffused
with the spirit of 68. Apres mai (titled innocuously Something in the
Air in English) is a moving and exciting film, inspired, apparently,
autobiographically by Assayas' youthful radical activism. Young
Gilles, the stand-in for Assayas, is a high school militant in 1971,
still filled with he promise and zeal of May 68, exhilarated by clashes
with the police as well as passionate debates, and romantic
infatuations, with comrades. Gilles is a budding artist, his development
fuelled as much by spray painting illegal slogans at night as by his own
drawing and reading. As a coming of age tale, the film is concerned with
the difficult lessons of growing up but very consciously in a particular
historical moment. The self-centred, even indulgent, nature of
autobiography is contextualized with a convincing portrait of the
sixties as cultural and social change and conflict in everything--all
the excitement of sex, drugs, rock and roll--and revolution! The details
of music, clothes, mores, hair, generational altitudes, gender and
sexual politics are all part of the dramatization. There is, of course,
an element of nostalgia here, especially for those of us who share a
similar political biography. But that nostalgia is given import by the
hopeful fusion of history with biography that the grand political epic
of the sixties provides for the characters, and we spectators. Assayas
tries to make us think historically about the sixties, and by extension,
our present, through the opening eyes of his young self. (Of course, the
fantasy that biography will just coincide with history is an especially
masculine wish-fulfillment, sardonically noted by one of the characters
in Alain Tanner's Jonah will be 25 in the year 2000, another great
sixties film)
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Assayas provided a lengthy lecture/interview for the press at this
year's Festival; he is a strikingly intelligent and sophisticated
critic of his own work and provided a number of valuable insights. He
named Guy Debord, the legendary theorist and activist of the
Situationist International--to some, one of the sparks of 68--as a key
artistic and intellectual influence. We can see the film's
presentation of Gilles and his comrades as enacting a politics of
'events'and counter-spectacle to the dominating and daunting
power of the society of the spectacle. But Gilles' journey
concludes with a job in the centre of that spectacle, the movie
industry, so we cannot avoid finally confronting the allure and power of
the prevailing social order. Assayas balances an exuberant sense that
the world can be changed--"we always have it in our hands to change
the world"--with an astute calibration of what failed in the
sixties. On the one hand, he says that "everybody believed that the
revolution was around the corner". That excitement comes through
and the sense of a collapse of historical time seems crucial, absurd but
plausible all at once, to a belief in radical social transformation. On
the other, Assayas has an acute sense that his young characters were in
a frightening "social war", with values and possibilities
changing and collapsing in uncertain and confusing ways; not all come
through safely. That the personal became political can also be
dangerous: Assayas said he wanted to show "the turmoil of the world
upside-down and the way I survived the seventies."
The film's portrayal of the day to day politics of the sixties
and seventies is similarly balanced by what succeeded and what became
dead-ends for the Left. We see the central role of Maoist and Trotskyist
revolutionary organizations in organizing and continuing the struggle.
We also see Gilles developing a critique of sectarian vanguardism and
leftist third worldism, as he questions the struggle over correct lines
and the fervent adulation of the Cultural Revolution. These political
arguments and observations are presented with clarity and sympathy,
albeit in a rudimentary form, appropriate to the protagonist's
youthful combination of intelligence and naivete. Similarly, the
attraction of political violence as revolutionary hopes wane, and state
repression intensifies, is presented as understandable and, just as
clearly, futile.
It is, of course, extremely rare to see such political debates
presented in a theatrical feature film and Assayas manages to do so
intelligence and wit. We even see young Gilles anguishing over the
classic leftist debate about the role of art in politics as he
participates in a filmmaking collective and cannot help but be bored by
sincere third world solidarity documentaries; Gilles, like Assayas, will
find his artistic vocation elsewhere: by implication he wants to grow up
to make the film we are watching.
Straight from the sixties, Loin du Vietnam/Far from Vietnam is a
little seen but still famed solidarity documentary. A restored print was
presented, dedicated to the revered, recently deceased, Chris Marker.
Marker coordinated, edited, and provided the stirring narration for this
film, collectively made by key figures of sixties French cinema,
including Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Michael Klein,
Joris Ivens and Jean-Luc Godard. Marker's filmmaking collective,
SLON (Societe pour le Lancement des Ouvres Nouvelles) organized the
film, distribution was mostly limited to screenings for militants of the
burgeoning anti-war movement. The film shows that Gilles'
polarization of political documentary against art is too simplistically
stark; it fulfills the instrumental political vocation of solidarity
while it is also suffused with the artistic innovation we associate with
the French New Wave. The film is organized in segments--powerful
newsreel of bombing, footage shot with Vietnamese civilians and
revolutionaries, an interview with Fidel Castro on the centrality of
Vietnam and guerrilla war--and connected by Marker's narration.
Contributions from Klein and Godard challenge the very cinematic act of
solidarity we are watching. Godard appears on screen, hidden behind a
camera, voicing, provocatively, gratingly, his doubts of what can be
done--so far from Vietnam, where revolution was really occurring. Of
course, the film was made in 1967, just months before May 68 would make
revolution seem so much closer to France. Then the collapse of
historical time coincided with the concentration of geographical space
that imperialism and revolution appeared to accomplish, suddenly,
clearly, connecting Vietnam and Paris. Seeing this film again, after
years, was an invigorating excavation of an important example of
politically and aesthetically powerful filmmaking.
In Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, Angela Davis echoes
Assayas exactly: "we thought revolution was right around the
corner." A long interview with the still eloquent and charismatic
Davis organizes this entertaining documentary about the famed sixties
revolutionary. Interspersed with newsreel footage, Davis recounts her
radical education, her experience with the Communist Party and her
persecution, flight, trial and acquittal; it is an emotional and
exciting narrative. Davis, along with other black militants, is caught
in the contradictions as the civil rights movement radicalizes in the
later sixties and state repression escalates. The documentary is
exciting and emotional but needed a more forceful political discussion.
Just celebrating an icon of the sixties can become hagiographic and
sentimental. While Davis does draw some sharp political distinctions
between her Marxism and feminism and the nationalism and masculine
bravado of the Black Panthers, she is not asked to consider obvious, if
difficult, issues of the futility of an armed political strategy, or the
limitations of vanguardism in mass movements, or the connection between
broad defensive coalitions and the goal of socialism. Davis would have
powerful and interesting opinions to bring to such a discussion but the
filmmakers appear to be aiming for a broader, less politically
sophisticated audience. However, Assayas' fictional and personal
dramatization illustrates that such issues can be taken on in an
entertaining and challenging way. Free Angelo fulfills a narrower,
liberal function as a popularization of themes of continuing struggle
and organization redolent still after decades.
The impact of the sixties could be seen in other examples. Far from
Afghanistan is specifically inspired by, and in homage to, Loin du
Vietnam. A group of contemporary filmmakers contribute segments of a
collective film, protesting the more recent imperialist depradations of
the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the Western powers led by
the United States. Like the earlier film, there is powerful use of
newsreel footage of bombing and what we have come to call collateral
damage. Noam Chomsky provides a succinct introduction to the politics of
empire. Other segments poignantly suggest the war has come home in
painful ways in American poverty and in the suicidal anguish of
veterans. A Soviet documentary from the seventies is used to ironic
effect. Other segments focused on formal meditations on images are less
successful and the distance from the politically charged lively formal
inventiveness of the New Wave in the earlier film is obvious. But
overall, the film is a moving and interesting salute to and continuation
of a radical lineage.
One sixties film I did not see; that icon of Hollywood liberalism,
Robert Redford portrays a Weatherman--the sixties distillation of the
end of the antiwar movement and the attraction of political
violence--still underground and on the run after decades, in The Company
You Keep. So cinematic dramatization of the uses and failures of
political violence, the role of vanguardist organizations in mass
movements, the painful costs of activism and social change--loved and
reviled, the sixties redux--will be coming to your multiplex soon.
BY SCOTT FORSYTH
