May 68.

There are so many commemorative series in various cities marking the 40th anniversary of May 68 and so many writers revisiting films somehow related to that tumultuous month in various publications that it's high time for a sort of overview entry.

"New Yorkers can mark the occasion with two rich and wide-ranging programs that aim to capture, on screen, the spirit of that bygone age," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "One, at Film Forum (Friday through June 5), is devoted to [Jean-Luc] Godard in the 1960s, when he was at the height of his influence, productivity and creative power. The other, at Lincoln Center (Tuesday through May 14), stretches across geography, time and genre: from Paris and Chicago to Hungary, Japan and Brazil; from journalistic documentaries to agitprop and experimental theater; from defiant in-the-moment statements of revolutionary zeal to somber post-mortem contemplations of ideological exhaustion and political defeat.... To rediscover 40 years later some of the cinematic experiments of 1968 is to be amazed at how raw, how urgent, how disarmingly alive these films are."

Updated through 5/4.

There are two series in London as well. The current issue of the BFI's Sight & Sound has much to offer in print, though not online, as a supplement to the BFI Southbank season Pop Goes the Revolution: French Cinema and May 68, wrapping on Wednesday; last month, Gilbert Adair, who wrote the screenplay for Bertolucci's The Dreamers, based on his own semi-autobiographical novel, had a piece on the series in the Guardian. And Will Kane's gathered several related clips.

All Power to the Imagination! 1968 and Its Legacies is on through June 10, and just yesterday, I pointed to Sukhdev Sandhu's piece on that one in the Telegraph, accompanied by a list of his May 68 top ten. See, too, Sue Steward's introduction to an exhibition of 46 vintage street posters opening at the Hayward Gallery on May 1. Earlier: Daniel Tapper, blogging for the Guardian.

In Berlin, Kino Arsenal presents 1968//2008, a series of 98 films beginning on May 1 and running through July and including all the works of the Dziga Vertov Group (1967 through 1974). Kino Babylon Mitte's series Paris: May 68 runs May 9 through 16 and features an exhibition and an opening debate, "1968 in Today's Europe," between Daniel Cohn-Bendit and André Brie. And still on through the end of May: 68: Brennpunkt Berlin. For more, see Silvia Hallensleben in today's Tagesspiegel (and in German).

Recently wrapped is the Pacific Film Archive's The Clash of 68, and Michael Guillén had a terrific piece on Bertolucci's Before the Revolution.

Meanwhile, in today's Observer, Nick Fraser, editor of the BBC documentary series Storyville, argues that "agitprop is back in vogue." And he lists ten films, from Citizen Kane through Brokeback Mountain, that "made waves."

Updates, 4/29: For the New York Sun, Steve Dollar previews the Lincoln Center's 1968: An International Perspective (today through May 14) - and Film Forum's Godard's 60s (Friday through June 5).

Tom Hall looks over both series, too, and asks, "What is left for me, for my generation? Where do we stand in relation to this definitive experience that has shaped our collective imagination, an image of populism so powerful that we have been unable to replace its fundamental physical structure in the decades since its collapse?"

At the House Next Door: Lauren Wissot on It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives and The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp.

Ricky D'Ambrose in the Tisch Film Review: "There is a tremendous passion to revitalize the medium with these films, and an immense offering of images and sensations curious about the cinema's potential for being agitated, disrupted, transformed."

A symposium: "Many 68ers now feel ambivalent about their heritage. Was too much of value discarded? Were the hippies just carriers of a new strain of capitalism? What was the silent majority thinking? Prospect writers give their views." Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Hot Splice rounds up more linkage.

The Guardian asks, "Were you there?" And Daniel Tapper revisits Godard's Weekend.

The Creative Review takes a look at those posters.

Updates, 4/30: "Back then, it seemed as though life itself were a movie," writes J Hoberman. As for the Lincoln Center series, "the quintessential movie is: Dusan Makavejev's 1971 WR: Mysteries of the Organism is part counterculture doc, part New Left comedy, the saddest and funniest of 68 post-mortems, as well as the movie most redolent of the period—that is, everything at once."

Also in the Voice, Scott Foundas presents "A Necessarily Incomplete Guide to Godard."

"The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French," notes Steven Erlanger, reporting from France for the New York Times. "While a youth revolt became general in the West - from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany - France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike, and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior." And there's a slide show.

Cahiers du cinéma presents a book, Cinema 68. And speaking of books in French, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is stirring things up in France with his latest, Forget 68.

The L Magazine's Mark Asch on the Lincoln Center series: "Expect formally boundary-pushing metacinematic works and movies whose reels can be shown in any order, on-the-street documentation, and more and more and more. And Regular Lovers. (God, see Regular Lovers.)"

Update, 5/1: "Nearly every text in the current issue looks at May 1968 specifically in historical counterpoint, operating in a comparative and genealogical mode that brings the questions of 68 to bear on today," writes Artforum editor Tim Griffin. "To give an example that speaks to the contemporary art context: When independent scholar Sally Shafto writes of the Zanzibar group's intermingling of leftist politics and cinematic dandyism - and attributes a 'destabilizing potential' to their contradictory mix - one is bound to think as well of similar film- and video-making collectives working now and to wonder whether the potential of such seeming contradiction in culture remains the same."

Unfortunately, Shafto's essay is not online, but a few of this issue's May 68-related pieces are: Arthur C Danto looks back at the student revolt at Columbia University, Sylvère Lotringer talks with Antonio Negri, Tim McDonough revisits Henri Lefebvre's The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution (tipping his hat to Godard's La Chinoise along the way), Tom Holert surveys Germany's radical art scene at the time (Harun Farocki provides much of the imagery accompanying this one) and Liam Gillick argues that "1968 was the last instance of major change within the art context, supplying us with the critical tools we still use today."

Chris Kraus notes that "after 1968 the word liberation would have to migrate from a term used to describe anticolonial struggles to include almost all aspects of daily life. In the ensuing half decade, sexuality became central to these investigations..." This introduces a discussion of Suck: The First European Sex Paper, which "also produced the Wet Dream Film Festival of banned erotic and pornographic films in Amsterdam, which took place in 1970 and 1971, and published a book (Wet Dreams: Films and Adventures) commemorating the festivals in 1973. 'Everyone was lovely,' [Heathcote] Williams recalls of the era in [Jim] Haynes's 1984 autobiography, Thanks for Coming! 'Suddenly the vision of everyone Coming Together could only be physical... no longer intellectual. The sex politics of Reich, the belief of Auden that we must love one another or die, the holy orgiastics of Willie Blake, God's Rake, had to burst through... Suck was a display of pantheistic and revolutionary Schtupping. You cannot fuck everyone in the world, but at least you can try.'"

"Since 1968, the west has grown not only more prosperous but more sybaritic and self-absorbed, and even that cultural victory of the left hasn't turned out as intended, especially in terms of the sexual revolution that was arguably the true legacy of the age," writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian. "The 'bourgeois triumphalism' of the Thatcher (and Blair) era, the greed is good ethos which even the governor of the Bank of England now condemns, and our materialistic individualism, might just have had their roots 40 years back."

Updates, 5/2: Kenji Fujishima on Pierrot le fou:

[T]he heart of this seminal Godard work lies not so much in its "last romantic couple," not in Raoul Coutard's eye-popping color cinematography (capturing both privilege and freedom in lush comic-book colors), not even in its many plot twists and tonal and genre shifts. All of these are certainly important to the film's being, of course, but its real heart and soul lies in its middle section: that lengthy passage set at the edge of civilization, in the south of France, as Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) - now liberated from the alienating clutches of his privileged life - strives to live out his dream of intellectual freedom, while the less introspectively inclined Marianne (Anna Karina) yearns to "go back to our detective novel, with fast cars and guns and nightclubs." This passage is perhaps the most personal and resonant in Pierrot le fou: no longer shackled by the chains of narrative and genre expectations (which of course Godard tries to undermine in his usual postmodern way), Godard himself, ever the intellectually searching mind, is free to give full rein to all the philosophical and political inquiries that are weighing on him.

Also at the House Next Door, Dan Callahan on Breathless: "The Hôtel de Suède sequence is the heart of the film, and Godard returned to and intensified it in Contempt, where Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot try to connect for at least a half hour. This man/woman battle is really completed, though, in Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Fou, which brings the struggle to it logical, May of 1968 destruction (it has been rumored that Rivette based his hotel nightmare with Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon on an actual incident between Godard and Karina toward the end of their relationship)."

While May 68 is being "vigorously commemorated" in France, any real debate "is confined mostly to the media and intellectual class," writes Patrice de Beer at openDemocracy. "The normally voluble President Nicolas Sarkozy (who said during the election campaign in 2007 that 'May 68's heritage must be liquidated once and for all') has since kept quiet. More important, the French 'people' themselves - in whose name so many of the 1968 protests were launched and speeches were delivered - appear uninterested."

Update, 5/4: "[W]hen we talk of Godard, certainly in terms of post-68 France, we're talking about a cinema not just politically engaged but transformed into a medium for political confrontation: filmic missives that refuse to cloak their agenda in tangential details like narrative or character," writes robbiefreeling at the Reverse Shot blog. "Godard's first film, then, was to always remain unlike any of those that followed; political only as it related to genre representation and the decimation of his beloved art form in the hopes of rebuilding something new in its place, Breathess was both a new beginning and a full stop."

Posted by dwhudson at April 27, 2008 9:31 AM