political cinema filming 1968

8/13/2019 Political Cinema Filming 1968

1/13

Political Cinema and 1968


2/13

MLK in Tennessee with Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson,

and Ralph Abernathy, Lorraine Motel,

April 1968

March on Washington 1963


3/13

Paris 1968 riots


4/13


5/13

students and police at Berkeley protests, 1965


6/13


7/13

Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard,and Franois Truffaut call for a halt

to the 1968 Cannes Film Festival due

to the ongoing nationwide strike in

France.

Political cinema in the West:

1. Engaged cinema

2. Political Modernism3. Mainstream art cinema

dealing with political issues


8/13

Franois Truffaut:

Because it was the logical thing to do.

France was closing down, therefore Cannes

had to close down. While I was driving to

Cannes on May 17 to take part in a press

conference about the Cinmathque affair, I

was listening to the radio and every half-hour

came reports of more factories being

occupied. I wasnt sorry to see France

paralyzed, the government was in disarray.

Next day, when I asked for the Festival to be

stopped, I wasnt thinking particularly of agesture of solidarity with the workersId

have been more likely to feel solidarity with

the four students who were sentenced to jail

after a hasty session in a Sunday court. I

wasnt really thinking of challenging or

reforming the Festival, of doing away with

evening dress or making it more cultural. No,I just felt that in its own interest the Festival

should stop of its own accord rather than be

halted a few days later by the force of events.

I didnt see it as a military coup, I simply

wanted an unambiguous situation. In fact,

this is how it happened.


9/13

Film Essay- Cinematic essay: what the previous generation of documentary

filmmakers took as their "subject"--a passive subject as compared to the "active"

fictional subject--film essayists can now take as their theme in which the subject is a

particular development or an interpretation of that theme, and one that has a

determining influence upon the form of the film. The theme thereby becomes

extremely active in that the cinematic essay is often a meditation on ideas in conflict

and these conflicts actually suggest the form that the film might take. The cinematic

revolution now in progress is based on what is essentially a very simple idea: that a

subject can engender form and that to choose a subject is to make an aesthetic

choice. (Noel Burch, Non-Fictional Subjects, from THE THEORY OF FILM PRACTICE).

Collage Film

Dialectical Materialism

Brechts aesthetics, Brechtian

Brechtian realism

Poststructuralism and deconstructioninfluences of Jacques Derrida

The Dziga Vertov Group

1. Spotaneism2. Revisionism

3. Educational apparatus

4. Ideology

1. Ideology in everyday life

2. Cinema and ideology


10/13

Tout va bien. 1972; directed by Jean-Luc

Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin

starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand.

[Everything is Fine]


11/13

"Actually, if I have a secret ambition, it is to be put in charge of the French newsreel services. All my

films have been reports on the state of the nation; they are newsreel documents, treated in a personal

manner perhaps, but in terms of contemporary actualityWhen people ask me why I talk or have my

characters talkabout VietnamI refer the questioner to his own newspaper. It's all there. And it's all

mixed up. This is why I am so attracted by television. A televised newspaper made up of carefully

prepared documents would be extraordinaryThis is why, rather than speak of cinema and television, I

prefer to use the more general terms of images and sounds.

--Godard in 'L'Avant-Scene du Cinema 70', May 1967.

Gerard Fromanger is a multimedia artist

associated with the figuration narrative

movement of the 60s and 70s. Film-tract n

1968 recreates Fromangers painting Le

rouge.

Cine/Film tract


12/13

Marker recalls the events of May 68: In May, anyway, the final whistle came quickly:

with the first casualty. Left to their own devices amidst a reassured country, they

became weakly and purposeless. Historical anarchy had diedheroicallyin Spain. To

refer to it now made no more sense than being a royalist, unless it became an

ideological business, quite profitable at that. The Communist Party had missed every

helping hand offered by History and started the long spin of a motorless airplane.

French Maoism would remain a landmark in the history of teratology. The foolishness

of morons is a plague, but statistically speaking we have to put up with it. What is

fascinating is the foolishness of clever people and, in this particular case, some of the

cleverest.

Chris Marker

A Grin Without a Cat,

1977.


13/13

political cinema filming 1968

Documents