Berkley’s Pacific Film Archives is currently hosting a “Clash of 68″ film festival. Thanks to Amanda Ault for passing the information along. At the same time, the British Film Institute is hosting “Pop Goes the Revolution: French Cinema and May 68.” Descriptions of both are below.
About Clash of 68:
Soon to be forty years old, May ’68 is demonstrating creaky joints, age-related depression, and memory loss. Definitely memory loss. So The Clash of ’68 is dedicated to the memory of that most remarkable month and its surrounding history. The emphasis of this program is an expansive sense of global unrest focused on Paris, May ’68, as a watershed upheaval that surged forward with great optimism, only to be crushed by unyielding power. Not one to relinquish its influence easily, the United States also figures dramatically throughout—after all, it was the Vietnam War that catalyzed protests throughout the world and signaled a dramatic turn in the history of colonialism. Through Pontecorvo’s searing The Battle of Algiers and a rare screening of his Queimada!, a complex look at the contradictions of conquest; Chris Marker’s savant-like synthesis of global insurrection, A Grin Without a Cat; Alain Tanner and John Berger’s comic critique Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000; Oshima’s experiment in radical revelation, The Man Who Left His Will on Film; Bertolucci’s brilliant homage to bourgeois stasis, Before the Revolution; Antonino Isordia’s stylized look at the aftermath of Mexico’s Tlatelolco Massacre, 1973; Peter Watkins’s epic restaging of that utopian incubator, La Commune (Paris, 1871); and others, The Clash of ’68 presents an amalgam of unrest that reminds us that history never grows old.
The Clash of ’68 is presented in conjunction with the BAM exhibition Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg.
About Pop Goes the Revolution:
In early 1968, the subtly subversive pop star Jacques Dutronc was all over the French airwaves with a sweet song eulogising his home town – Il est 5 heures, Paris s’éveille (It is 5am, Paris awakes). Within weeks, Paris awoke in a way the wry Dutronc, and few of his countrymen, could have foreseen as a minor flare-up at Nanterre University led to barricades across the capital.
British and American cinema had spent the mid-60s reflecting their love-ins, be-ins, and all round swingingness. France alone could look to its film output of the period as a pointer to the riots of May ‘68. This season shows how the enfranchisement of youth in the mid-60s – whether through Jane Birkin breaking up a happy home in La Piscine, the dogmatic Jean Pierre Léaud in Masculin Feminin, or sculptured teen Polly Maggoo – was turning the world on its head. When it reached the tipping point of Nanterre, the conservative old world dramatically and violently attempted to reverse the trend.
Even Cannes wasn’t spared in ‘68. When the culture minister André Malraux tried to fire the co-founder and head of the Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langois, the result was direct action. Louis Malle and Roman Polanski both immediately resigned from the festival jury, while Godard and Truffaut burst into a screening and hung from the curtains to physically stop the festival from continuing.
The left still regards the events of May ‘68 as a great lost opportunity. The tone of international cinema was noticably bleaker for several years afterwards. Yet, while the repercussions of the political unrest continue to be debated, there was one concrete and positive result Henri Langois was re-instated.
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