More on May 68.

To pick up where this entry has just left off... "Censorship as a creative force was the theme for last week's series of discussions and screenings at the Barbican, culminating in an audience debate with the Polish and Hungarian masters Agnieszka Holland and Istvan Szabó," blogs Daniel Tapper for the Guardian. "Unfortunately, the overwhelming sentiment of the discussion was one of general distrust for human nature and a cynical outlook for western cinema." Further in: "In another screening of revolutionary cinema in the spirit of 1968, the Barbican treated an audience to a wonderful and rare 35mm print of Miklos Jancso's film The Round-Up."

In the Los Angeles Times, Susan King looks back to 2001: A Space Odyssey and several other remarkable films of 1968.

Updated through 5/12.

"The 1960s King Mob centred around brothers David and Stuart Wise, who had attended art school in Newcastle, developing an interest in the disruptive anti-art potential of Dada and Surrealism and a hard-edged politics partly derived from 19th century Russian Nihilism," writes Hari Kunzru in the new issue of TATEetc.

The poster, by the way, announces May 68 Forty Years On, a three-day colloquium at the University of London in Paris. May 15 through 17.

Online listening tip. "I see a series of, to use this ridiculous old-fashioned term, contradictions, or I would have said antagonisms, tensions, from ecology, intellectual copyrights, new slumps excluded, where I think in the long term the global capitalist system will not be able to cope with these tensions. Here is the true legacy of 68." Slavoj Zizek on Democracy Now.

Updates, 5/7: "What is living, what is dead, and what is hobbling and wheezing, in the many-faceted, transcontinental legacy of 68?" ask the editors of Dissent in the Spring 08 issue. Turning in answers are Marshall Berman, Robin Blackburn, Mitchell Cohen, Ralf Fuecks, Vivan Gornick, Michael Kazin, Enrique Krauze, Lillian B Rubin, Christine Stansell and Michael Walzer.

"Foolhardy is the critic who would ascribe an entire decade to one director, but allow me to play (Pierrot) the fool: the 60s belonged to Jean-Luc Godard." Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine on Godard's 60s, at Film Forum through June 5.

Eurozine runs Chris Reynolds's piece for Sens public on "why, despite such unprecedented focus, periodic analysis and reassessment, 68 remains the subject of intense debate and to a certain extent can be termed as indefinable."

"I don't love Godard's Le Petit soldat - I don't know why," writes Dan Sallitt. "I want to, and feel as if I should - but I'm fascinated by it." Two topics: "How Much Can You Undermine a Story and Still Have It Function As a Story?" and "Men Are a Lot Like Cameras When They Look at Women."

Update, 5/8: "[W]hile 1968 happened in both the western and the eastern halves of Europe, in Paris and in Prague, 1989 only really happened in the eastern half," writes Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian:

Politically, 89 changed far more. The Warsaw and Prague springs of 1968 ended in defeat; the Paris, Rome and Berlin springs ended in partial restorations, or only incremental change. Probably the largest street demo in Paris, on May 30 1968, was a manifestation of the political right, which the French electorate then returned to power for another decade. In West Germany, some of the spirit of May 30 flowed more successfully into Willy Brandt's reformist social democracy. Everywhere in the west, capitalism survived, reformed itself, and prospered. The events of 1989, by contrast, ended communism in Europe, the Soviet empire, the division of Germany, and an ideological and geopolitical struggle - the cold war - that had shaped world politics for half a century. It was, in its geopolitical results, as big as 1945 or 1914. By comparison, 68 was a molehill.

Updates, 5/9: This week's New Statesman features a cover package on 1968 with contributions from Eric Hobsbawm, Noam Chomsky, Greil Marcus and others.

"The ongoing series at Lincoln Center 1968: An International Perspective is an act of inspired programming," writes Miriam Bale at the Reeler. "Instead of a geographically or director-based series, it's based on political events from that year and, even more interestingly, their aftermath, with a high concentration of films from the early 70s."

Updates, 5/12: "Now that the 40th anniversary celebrations and memoirs of May 1968 are becoming ubiquitous, I'd like to get into the act by stating that I remember the 60s and I was there," writes Ronald Bergan, who "was also lucky to be living in Paris in May 68... It all seemed to be directed and choreographed by the artist who, more than any other, embodied the spirit of May 68 - Jean-Luc Godard."

Also: David N Meyer in the Brooklyn Rail on Godard's 60s.

Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling on A Woman Is a Woman: "It has that unique mix of whimsical and assaultive that Godard was on his way to perfecting (probably by Pierrot le fou, four years later), and a self-referentiality that borders on the oppressive; at any moment the film's never less than completely captivating and purposely alienating, and it's hard to imagine today such militantly New Wave tendencies going down easy (the deliberate pacing of our current moment's 'difficult' cinema seems more indebted to Antonioni; no one really much dares adopt Godard's technique)."

Posted by dwhudson at May 6, 2008 8:55 AM