Retentional Finitude

Richard Woolley - Inside and Outside (1974)

2012-01-22T22:01:00.001-08:00

Richard Woolley's ambitious Inside and Outside is structured around a series of dichotomies--inside/outside, East/West, theory/practice--that it progressively deconstructs. In the front room of a Berlin commune, a man and a woman diligently study communist texts. They solemnly discuss the alienating effects of modern industrial society, the isolation of the individual in a world of competition and consumerism. They complacently express their gratitude for the Communist Party, which gives their life direction and meaning, lecturing the viewer, "The Party shows us the right way and we happily obey." And they hold onto their love as an antidote to the atomization of society, saying, right after Woolley presents a Hollywood-style closeup of their kiss, "We have no need of other people." Despite their faith in the Party and love, the film reveals their position to be highly contradictory. The room is decorated with a picture of Marx, but the space's political iconography is also contaminated by a photograph of a naked woman on a bookshelf and by the multiple Coca Cola signs that can be seen on the building across the street. The couple abstractly tackles the subject of the loneliness of life in the city by reading from books rather than by paying attention to the concrete evidence of community visible on the other side of the window. After the couple kisses, the woman serves the man a beer and starts to dust, her political commitment apparently not interfering with traditional gender norms. Woolley also contrasts the artificial style of the actors who play the couple with the real behavior of the non-actors who pass by outside and often stop to peer in at the spectacle being filmed inside. So as the film progresses, the solipsistic world of the couple is increasingly exposed to all it was structured to keep out, and the film ends with the man and woman being expelled from the reassuring comforts of their room, its books, and their ideology in order to seek a revolutionary way of life not founded upon the exclusion of the real.

Roberto Rossellini: Europa '51

2012-01-15T09:34:00.000-08:00

In Rossellini's Europa '51, the complacent lifestyle of a bourgeois mother, Irene (played by Ingrid Bergman), is overturned by the suicide of her young child. This traumatic, unforeseen event leads Irene on a philanthropic mission to the hidden world of the poor in the housing projects on the outskirts of Rome. Her short voyage to the land of the people is guided by her journalist friend Andrea, who is able to place all the misery she observes within the meaningful framework of communism. Like Irene, the film itself leaves the artificial, isolated set of the bourgeois home and sets off in neorealist fashion to observe the bleak reality of the city. However, Irene and the film's progress towards (class) consciousness is interrupted when Irene on a later trip to the poor walks into a church, a detour that results in her ending up not a militant but a saint (with details drawn from the life of Simone Weil). In "A Child Kills Himself," Jacques Ranciere admits that when he first viewed the film during the 1960s, his Althusserian critical expectations were frustrated by Irene's retreat into religious idealism, which seemed to contradict the materialist first half of the film. But after watching the film 25 years later, Ranciere changed his evaluation. Rather than offer one more restaging of a teleological "coming-to-consciousness," the film, he argues, follows Irene as she gets lost and wanders into an atopia, a world where everything is not perfectly in its place and where she becomes like a foreigner who encounters what cannot be clearly represented by established discourses such as Marxism. Ranciere surely saw in Irene his own flight from the Althusserian science of the hidden into the archives of the workers' movements. He writes, "For she who had been invited to look behind things, the break comes from looking to the side instead."

Holger Meins: Oskar Langenfeld. 12 Mal (1966)

2011-10-01T17:50:00.001-07:00

Before he took up armed struggle against the state as a member of the Red Army Faction and became an icon of the left by dying from a hunger strike while in prison, Holger Meins studied film at the Film Academy in Berlin, making films alongside Harun Farocki and Helke Sander. Yet his aesthetics and politics, cinematic protest and guerilla resistance, cannot be kept wholly apart. His most infamous film details the making and use of a Molotov cocktail. And while underground with the RAF, Meins tricked a metal sculptor into producing functioning weapons as props for a film project, what Meins described as "a kind of revolutionary fiction." In the twelve brief chapters that compose the short film Oskar Langenfeld, Meins paints an unsparingly harsh portrait of his subject, an impoverished, aged man who attempts to maintain a dignified pose despite the humiliating power others hold over him, his miserable living conditions, and the uncontrollable coughing of his sickly body. Meins's film takes up an openly invasive perspective, pushing the viewer into an uncomfortable proximity with Langenfeld by showing intimate scenes such as his dressing or by regularly presenting extreme close-ups of his wrinkled face, even when mucus is apparent in his mouth. Meins also uses an extremely elliptical form of editing, jolting the viewer by abruptly starting and ending scenes. After mapping out the diminished, degraded scope of Langenfeld's existence, the film ends with Meins instructing Langenfeld, "Go on, say shit." Langenfeld then makes a number of attempts to satisfactorily express the dysphoria the filmmaker desires, to call the economic system that oppresses him what it is: "Shit."

Ulrike Meinhof / Eberhard Itzenplitz: Bambule (1970)

2011-08-02T16:27:00.001-07:00

Ulrike Meinhof completed the script for this television movie about a riot at a group home for girls after resigning from writing political commentaries for konkret in 1969 and before fleeing underground and helping form the Red Army Faction in 1970. The film was scheduled to be shown on television in May of 1970, but Meinhof's role in the freeing of Andreas Baader just weeks before led to its cancellation; though the script was published in 1971, the film was not shown on television until the late 1990s. It is therefore hard not to approach this film as a key document of Meinhof's political-intellectual transition from her increasingly conspicuous discontent with traditional forms of political activisim (including media interventions such as the film itself) to her embrace of revolutionary violence that refuses any compromise with the institutions of society. Meinhof based the script on her interviews and experiences with girls from public homes, a number of whom she put up in her own home (one, Irene Goergens, would even become a member of the RAF). The youth home in the film clearly is meant to resemble a prison and serve as a microcosm of society. The unruly young women in the home are routinely subjected to punitive forms of discipline, and all of their rights and privileges can be arbitrarily withdrawn, often through solitary confinement in the "hole." As one girl says, "Here everything is simple: No cigarettes, the hole, no leave, no TV. Here we know where we are." They are also forced to wash clothes, and despite the repetitive, mechanical nature of the work, they are paid very little and can have their wages docked as punishment for disobedience. Though severely attacked by the authorities, lesbianism pervades the institution, perhaps because, as Sarah Colvin argues, "lesbianism is a metaphor for solidarity" within the film. One of the younger guardians, Mrs. Lack, is more sympathetic and kind to the girls. But despite her good (i.e., liberal) intentions, she finds herself forced to carry out the repressive measures of the institution with which she has not the will to break, and one of the girls eventually confronts her by saying, "Decide once and for all, if you are with us or with them." The film pays extra attention to Irene, who runs away only to find the outside world of prostitution and predators no more tolerable than the public home. While she is away, the other girls riot one night after having all of their privileges taken away. They tear up their beds, smash their furniture into pieces, and furiously pound against the walls of their room while screaming and crying. Their aimless destructive rage is soon suppressed when the police are called in. One girl tells Irene when she willingly returns to the home the next day, "We do an action and what happens? Cops come and then nothing." Having witnessed the cruel realities waiting for them both within and without the institution, Irene, however, argues to continue resisting, though in a more conscious and directed manner, and the film hints that the girls will riot again that night. When "Bambule" appears over the final image, the word is less the reappearance of the film's title than a command aimed at the viewer and society. In a radio report appearing elsewhere, Meinhof offered this explanation: "Bambule means rebellion, resistance, counter-violence - efforts toward liberation. "

Stuart Hagmann: The Strawberry Statement (1970)

2011-08-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

As one would expect from the spectacle, The Strawberry Statement offers a condescending and reductive view of the student movement of the 1960s, but the film in its final minutes undoes its own work of political neutralization by rendering exhaustively visible the violence of the police. Based on James Simon Kunen's autobiographical book on the 1968 Columbia revolt, the film (as well as Kunen's book) takes its title from an infamous statement an Associate Dean at Columbia made about his caring as little about students' political views as about their feelings for strawberries. Unable to obtain permission to film at Columbia, the filmmakers moved the events to an imaginary university in San Francisco, one of a series of displacements that unfortunately leaves the film completely ungrounded in history and reality. From either cinematic incompetence or smug cynicism (I honestly can't tell which), the film spends its first hour portraying the student movement as consisting of clueless and immature idiots. The film focuses on Simon, a young member of the university rowing team, who slowly becomes conscious of the protests and occupations occurring on his campus. This political education is largely fueled by his attraction to a young radical named Linda, whom Simon picks up at a disorganized occupation of the president's office. After wavering between his commitment to practicing his rowing "stroke" and his desire to take part in the the student "strike," Simon manages to solve his juvenile "identity crisis" by fully throwing himself into the movement. The film is nearly unbearable as it tracks Simon's far from profound political awakening, but everything changes in the film's conclusion when the police savagely remove Simon and his fellow student comrades from a gymnasium they are occupying. Limited by their documentary origins, both Newsreel's Columbia Revolt and Peter Whitehead's The Fall suffer from a lacuna at their climactic moment. For obvious practical reasons, the police raid on Hamilton Hall and Low Library, the moment the violence of the police and the state is revealed, escapes the grasp of the two films, which focus instead on the traces of brutality left behind, particularly the students' bruised and bloodied bodies. In contrast, The Strawberry Statement, operating more freely in the realm of fiction, dilates that moment of violence into a ten minute spectacle that, while perhaps serving exploitative commercial purposes, surely remains one of the most extensive and crazed representations of police repression in the history of film. Ultimately, the previous dismissive account of the student movement is wiped away in a politically inarticulate but nonetheless powerful haze of tear gas and police beatings.

Rudolf Thome: Red Sun (1970)

2011-07-04T17:16:00.000-07:00

Demented, provocative, and fashionable all at once, Red Sun taps into the zeitgeist of the late 1960s by inserting a dose of radical feminism into the horror genre. At the film's beginning, Thomas, a disheveled and alienated member of the counterculture who is fleeing from something in Hamburg, or perhaps just from civilization itself, hitchhikes his way to an uptight nightclub, where he picks up the sexy young bartender, Peggy (played by Uschi Obermaier, a model, rock star groupie, and member of the infamous Berlin Kommune 1). Penniless, uninterested in work, and more than a bit parasitic, Thomas moves into the commune-like apartment that Peggy shares with her three almost equally beautiful and stylishly-dressed female roommates. But as Thomas starts to fall in love with Peggy, he begins to realize that more than female sexual liberation is behind the steady stream of men moving through these women's lives. As it turns out, the four roommates have agreed to kill any man with whom they have been in a relationship for 5 days. As one of the women confesses, in a typically inarticulate manner, "We kill men. . . . There's not a lot to say." As it shows the comically unrealistic murders of the arrogant, materialistic men whom the women bring home, or follows the feminine collective as its members go shoplifting together at the grocery store or cheer enthusiastically when they successfully test a bomb, the film swerves toward radical feminist fantasy. Unfortunately, the representation of this critical attack on patriarchy and capitalism doesn't interfere with the constant sexual objectification of the female stars, whose barely-clothed bodies are continuously on display for the audience. As Thomas approaches his 5 day limit, personal desire of course starts to conflict with the militant discipline that the women impose on each other. Thomas is no stranger to the kind of radical ideals that presently threaten his life. At one point early in the film, he asks Peggy to put marmalade on ham for him, explaining this bizarre combination by proclaiming, "We've got to break with tradition. That's today's task." The result, however, is completely inedible. But his final, futile plan to run off to Morocco with Peggy ("we'll be better people there") still reflects the (sometimes deranged) revolutionary optimism exhibited by all of the main characters. The feeling is best stated by one long-haired man who briefly appears in the apartment and says, "Even if we have to change the weather to change society, then we'll do it. . . . It's not impossible."

Konrad Wolf: The Divided Heaven (1964)

2011-07-03T17:37:00.001-07:00

Adapted from Christa Wolf's novel of the same name, The Divided Heaven is a terrific East German film about young lovers who are pulled apart by the political division that was becoming increasingly absolute as the Berlin Wall was being constructed. The film's wonderful visual aesthetic does much to mitigate the story's didactic and schematic tendencies. Clearly inspired by the French New Wave and benefiting from a cultural thaw that would hardly last another year, Konrad Wolf takes great stylistic liberties in the composition of his widescreen images and draws on Resnais's sophisticated use of montage to weave together layers of time and memory. The film starts out as a self-consciously banal love story involving Rita, a young woman nearing the age of 20, and Manfred, an older student finishing his doctorate in chemistry. Rita is accepted into a teaching college, so she moves to the city and into a room with Manfred. While waiting for her school to start, she volunteers to work in a factory helping to construct railroad cars alongside a group of men. Witnessing the struggle of a few workers against the inefficiencies and deceptions plaguing the socialist production system, Rita learns to be optimistic about the power of individual responsibility and honesty. Meanwhile at school, she is verbally attacked by a dogmatic fellow student after she sympathetically covers for a friend whose entire family fled to the west. But the institute director defends her by making an argument about the need for tolerance within the party. After receiving his degree, Manfred heads down a path quite different from Rita's. He develops an innovative chemical method that he hopes will be adopted by the factory. But bureaucratic opportunism and conservatism soon frustrate Manfred, leading him to become increasingly cynical about history and humanity. Not even an astonishing moment when an announcement that the Russians put a man in space makes everyone briefly stop and feel that his or her sacrifices and efforts are part of a larger History reverses Manfred's course. After expressing his discontent more and more visibly, he finally runs off to take a job in West Berlin, where he feels his scientific talents will be both recognized and rewarded. Rita eventually follows Manfred to West Berlin, where the two of them have a tormented debate while wandering around in a capitalist environment that Wolf presents as a kind of alien space, one that is luxurious but also cold. Rita admits that this environment makes her yearn, but, wearing what Manfred dismisses as her "political spectacles," she argues that in the "free world," "you like a lot of things, but they don't make you happy." While walking amidst enormous billboards or through illuminated nightlife attractions that reinforce her argument, Rita explains to Manfred why she can't abandon the socialist project and join him. After she surprises everyone by returning to the east, an older version of herself heard on the soundtrack draws out the moral: "Maybe now you will realize that the fate of the coming generations depends on the strength of countless people in very single moment."

Robert Kramer: Route One/USA (1989)

2011-07-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

Over its four-hour running time, Robert Kramer's Route One casually explores the strange wilderness of American society in the 1980s. The film is structured by a drive taken by Kramer and "Doc" down the titular road from the Canadian border to Key West. Along the way, they encounter a diverse range of communities, hunt down the elusive traces of history, and reflect on the contradictions of American culture. The film is an odd mixture of documentary and fiction. Throughout most of the film, Kramer remains hidden behind the camera, his voice subdued. He uses Doc, a quasi-fictional character played by Paul McIsaac, to mediate between reality and the camera. Doc initially functions as a useful way of entering into and interacting with different communities rather than simply interviewing strangers in a supposedly objective manner. Doc also directly expresses emotional responses to the sad realities of the nation. In the film's last half, however, Doc becomes a bit too much of a character, especially when he begins to develop a love interest, and the film only recovers when Kramer takes off on his own with his camera. Both Kramer and Doc are radicals from the 1960s and expatriates who are ambivalent about the country they are returning to for the first time in many years. Doc even reads from Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" at the beginning of their trip, explaining that the poem represents the America he loves, which be believes will be quite different from the America they will actually discover as they travel. They are, as one of them states, "coming back, not home." Indeed, the film's unique perspective is largely due to this pervasive sense of the uncanny, the home which is no longer home. Or as Doc says, "everything is different and nothing has changed." Kramer and Doc's leftist background is most evident during the great deal of time they spend with minorities in urban ghettos, contemplating the inequalities of America. But when encountering conservatives, they patiently listen and observe, even becoming friendly with an old religious couple that takes part in protests against abortion clinics and espouses anti-liberal conspiracy theories. Kramer occasionally uses montage to juxtapose the contradictory sides of American society, such as when he cuts from a poor teenage husband just arrested for stealing a car to a wealthy prosecutor wandering around his large estate. He also carefully selects revealing statements, such as those made by an army recruiter who claims that the quality of recent recruits reflects the positive change in American culture during the 1980s. Kramer and Doc are clearly disturbed by much of what they come across, but their trip eventually revitalizes and expands their sense of political purpose. At one point in the film, Doc explains that he survived the harsh realities of the last ten years he spent as a doctor in Africa initially solely through his commitment to the idea of revolution. But eventually only alcohol and drugs kept him going, burning much of himself up in the process. But as Kramer and Doc finally approach Key West and the literal end of the road, it is clear to both men that their radical aspirations no longer appear as a dead end.

Koji Wakamatsu: United Red Army (2007)

2011-07-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

Koji Wakamatsu's brutal film dwells on one of the most troubling episodes in the history of the left: the Japanese United Red Army's execution of 14 of its own members during self-criticism sessions at the Asama Sanso Mountain Lodge in 1972. Propelled by Jim O'Rourke's psych-rock-simulacra soundtrack, the film begins by using documentary footage to chart the radicalization of the Japanese student movement during the 1960s. Wakamatsu starts with the death of a student during protests against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1960. As this helpful history lesson progresses, the students, shifting from protest to resistance, become increasingly militant and confrontational, by the last half of the decade fully throwing themselves into the long struggle in Sanrizuka against the construction of the airport or occupying buildings and clashing with the police during protests against tuition increases. Wakamatsu mixes a few re-enactments into this flood of historical images, mostly to clarify the development of the various communist factions that around 1970 turned to armed struggled in order to advance what they saw as a world revolutionary war. As was the case in other countries, the increase in revolutionary violence quickly led to an increase in state repression. Desertions, betrayals, and arrests soon undermined the organizational structure of many of these groups. In 1971, the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the Revolutionary Left Faction (RLF) merged into the United Red Army (URA). Adopting a militarized view of the party, members of the URA retreated to a mountain lodge for training as revolutionary soldiers. Wakamatsu devotes the majority of his film to this period of retreat, which ended in death for many of those involved. The film offers some striking shots of radicals training with guns in a snow-covered, mountainous environment, but most of the time is spent in bare, undecorated rooms, in which the militants undertake endless rounds of self-criticism. Budget limitations may explain this minimal aesthetic, but the visual austerity underscores the URA's solipsistic and ascetic tendencies. Deliberately cutting themselves off from the complex political realities of Japanese society, the militants, huddled around in circles, fixate on obtaining revolutionary purity rather than focus on the practical realization of the revolution. As a result of this confusion of goals, self-criticism functions less as a means for ideological enlightenment than as a form of disciplinary punishment, usually sadistically imposed on individuals by the two leaders (one of whom makes the revealing statement, "Leadership is beating"). The individuals subjected to self-criticism are unable to confess adequately their revolutionary sins to the other members of the group, who actively police each other's desires and actions. For over a grueling hour on the screen, members of the URA, one after another, are lynched by their comrades. Already self-destructing, the group is soon hunted down by the police, and the film ends by following a few final members who, even when caught in a hopeless hostage situation, absurdly continue their self-critique and argue over whether eating a cookie is a counterrevolutionary act.

Romain Goupil: Mourir a 30 ans / Half a Life (1982)

2011-04-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

Romain Goupil's Mourir a 30 ans (Half a Life) recalls the history of the youngest end of the extra-parliamentary French left in the late 60s/early 70s from a perspective that is equally personal and political. Using interviews, documentary footage, and the films Goupil made during his youth, the movie recounts Goupil's own experiences in the political movements leading up to and following from May '68, as well as pays tribute to his friend and comrade, Michel Recanati, whom Goupil worked alongside in politics for many years but who surprisingly committed suicide in 1978 at the age of 30. An unruly child from a middle-class leftist family, Goupil became involved in politics early in his teens (perhaps around the age of 14), joining the Trotskyite JCR (Jeunesses Communistes Revolutionnaires) after quickly becoming disillusioned with the French Communist Party's complacency. The JCR provided Goupil an early education in Marxism-Leninism, and brought him together with other militant young students who would become long-term comrades, including Recanati. Political activism in his school led to Goupil's suspension, and, despite student protests in response, his expulsion, but Goupil refused to become any less political while "maturing" at another school. Goupil's father was in the film industry, so Goupil had access to a camera from an early age and obsessively filmed the events in his life or recreated them in Truffaut-esque fictional versions. Mourir a 30 ans draws heavily on this personal archive to tell the story of Goupil's political coming of age, which is also a history of the JCR and the groups that flowed into and out of it. By May '68, Goupil was merely 17, but, along with his equally young militant peers, had already accumulated years of experience of political organizing, including acting as a bodyguard for the Black Panthers when they visited Paris and sojourning in Berlin amongst the German New Left. During the events of May, Goupil and Recanati played leading roles in the Comités d'action lycées (CAL), which brought secondary students into the revolutionary movement. Using rare footage he shot, Goupil recounts the disconnect he felt at the beginning of that month as he went from street fighting one day to sitting in a classroom the next. As is the case with most films on May '68, Goupil's memorializing of those revolutionary days occasionally slips into nostalgia and privileges self-aggrandizement at the expense of historical insight, such as when Goupil focuses on a series of images that place himself and Recanati at the center of the events. In the months following May, the fight to continue the movement devolved into a power struggle amongst the different political groups, though Recanati would remain a significant leader for the younger organizations. The film documents how both young men over the next few years continued to participate in rallies and protests, as well as illegal direct actions such as bombing embassies with paint. After an organization led by Recanati violently clashed with police at an anti-fascist rally, Recanati was given a three month prison sentence and briefly fled underground. As Goupil frames it, the political limits of the period brought out Recanati's personal limits, the fragility lurking underneath his bold facade, which in an unknown manner transformed Recanati's optimism about changing his life into his premature termination.

Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg: The New Babylon (1929)

2011-04-02T21:44:00.001-07:00

The New Babylon is a sensational silent film about the Paris Commune of 1871. As the military goes off to fight a disastrous war against the Prussians, the Parisian bourgeoisie indulges in an orgy at the New Babylon department store, where shopping, dancing, and drinking are the order of the day. The film uses expressionist techniques to illustrate the frenzied passions of the consumers and the hazy and drunken life of leisure. Before long, the festivities are interrupted by the announcement of French defeat, which literally closes the curtains on this world of decadence. The bourgeoisie having fled to Versailles, the workers institute the Commune, the political beginning of the emancipation of labor. Unfortunately, the film has a hard time imagining the transformation of everyday life during the Commune. The film does present the enthusiasm of the communards, showing what Marx in "The Civil War in France" describes as "Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris--almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates--radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative!" But for the most part, the workers in the film are confined to happily doing the same repetitive, tedious forms of labor as before--and at an even faster pace. The film fares better when the Commune is threatened and the barricades are constructed from the stones in the street and the furniture from homes. Even the commodities from the department store, which have been stripped of exchange value, or as one communard ironically taunts, put on "sale," are used for the defense of the Commune. Shostakovich's original score, which is alternately satirical and elegiac, sweeps over the film as the bourgeoisie leisurely enjoys from Versailles the spectacle of the communards giving their lives at the barricades. The violence of the bosses and police--in other words, "order"-- is soon restored to Paris, and the communards are coldly executed in the rain. But their fallen bodies continue to inscribe their truth: "Vive la Commune."

Slatan Dudow: Kuhle Wampe / Who Owns the World? (1932)

2011-03-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

An incomparably important work of political filmmaking, Kuhle Wampe is an openly communist film about the plight of the working class in Weimar Germany. Collectively produced in an independent manner, the film features music by Hanns Eisler and was largely written by Bertolt Brecht, whose theories deeply inform the film's aesthetics. The film opens with a rapid montage of newspaper headlines that indicate the seriousness of Germany's economic crisis and the high rate of unemployment. Following a cruelly direct title, "One Unemployed Worker Less," the film cuts to a band of young men who ride their bicycles around Berlin in search of employment. Eisler's jumpy music plays over angular shots of the bicycles in motion, emphasizing how this standing reserve army doesn't even have the luxury of standing still. After failing to find work, one of the unemployed cyclists goes home, where, after facing the disappointment of his family, he commits suicide by leaping from a window. The family is soon evicted from the apartment for failing to pay rent and moves into the home of Fritz, the boyfriend of the family's daughter Anni. Fritz lives in Kuhle Wampe, a tent camp on the outskirts of Berlin where the defeated members of the working class have nostalgically gathered together in an attempt to recreate a normal life (that is, to live according to middle class standards). Throughout, the film regularly interrupts this narrative movement with more experimental sequences that invite the viewer's cognitive participation. For example, in a key scene, the father reads from the newspaper about a dancer, Mata Hari, who obtains a high price for her body, while the mother sits next to him and calculates the family's finances. Every so often, the film cuts to shots of food items, their prominently displayed price tags making visible their status as commodities, just like the dancer's body. An accidental pregnancy comes between Anni and Fritz, the latter still believing in his bachelor/liberal freedom. They reunite at a worker athlete contest, where the members of the working class attempt to reappropriate their bodies from capitalist production through motorcycle and boat races. A "red megaphone" agitprop theater group sings communist songs about oppression to the crowd that has gathered to view the sporting contests, mirroring the film's own combination of popular entertainment and political ideology. Afterwards, Anni and Fritz return home with the rest of the masses on the subway. This final scene, which some have claimed Brecht himself directed, is a masterpiece of politicized aesthetics, one that Godard surely knows well. On the subway, a man begins to read aloud a news story about Brazil burning 24 million pounds of coffee in order to maintain high prices. This topic is taken up and debated by the crowd in the subway car, turning the end of the film into a long conversation about world economics and revolutionary politics. A strong class line is drawn when one man, clearly not working class, speculates that "we" should acquire a colony so as to be able to get a cut of such price manipulations and a young, militant man confronts him, asking who this "we" is. In the end, the lovers, as well as the rest of the film's more traditional narrative elements, are subsumed into the larger, politically advancing movement of the working class.

Robert Kramer: Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977)

2011-03-25T20:23:00.001-07:00

Robert Kramer's Scenes from the Class Struggle In Portugal maps out from a left perspective the complex evolution of politics as a nation transforms itself in the wake of a revolution. Weakened by the costs of maintaining its colonial power, Portugal's fascist government succumbed to a bloodless military coup in 1975. At the moment of the revolution, the people joyfully joined the army in the streets. But in the months that followed, the reemergence of class struggle dissolved this appearance of unity. Different political parties participated in the new government, which was eventually dominated by the right and oriented towards the interests of foreign capital. But alongside the back and forth motions of parliamentary politics, the revolutionary process continued. There were occupations of unused land and houses, and a popular power movement arose outside of the confines of any party, even the communist party, which had committed itself to a reformist line. The army was particularly divided, with one wing supporting the most conservative elements of the nation and the other wing throwing itself behind the working class. The film lists off the various obstacles to the success of the class struggle: a large peasantry untouched by the revolution and even hostile to the left; a bourgeois state whose basic structures had been left largely unchanged; the continuity of the power and practices of the bureaucracies and the church; the relatively small number of workers in industry or agriculture, who might become organized, and a large middle class. Kramer's film documents the left's intense fight with these barriers, paying especially close attention to the operation of politics in everyday life. The film is as interested in the opinions of old women, many of whom are interviewed, as it is in the more refined statements of various political and military leaders. After highlighting the continued potential for struggle, the film ends with some gloomy--but still timely--notes on how the now dominant right, aligned with the "imperialist" interests of the World Bank and the IMF, has attempted to market a plan of "austerity & sacrifice" to the nation as "patriotism."

Shinsuke Ogawa: Sanrizuka: Peasants of the Second Fortress (1971)

2011-02-22T21:09:00.000-08:00

In 1966, the Japanese government announced plans to build a new international airport in Sanrizuka, near Narita City. The farmers on the land, however, refused to be bought out, fighting over the next decade one of the most dramatic struggles of modern Japanese history. The farmers' resistance to the prerogatives of capitalist modernization, which devalued traditional agriculture, was potentially conservative, but they gained the support of the student and antiwar movements, partially because the U.S. military was to use the planned airport. In 1968, Ogawa Shinsuke and his film collective, Ogawa Productions, arrived in Sanrizuka to document the farmers' struggle. Over the next nine years, Ogawa made a total of 7 films on Sanrizuka. The fourth film, Sanrizuka: Peasants of the Second Fortress, records the government's attempt to take the land between February 22 and March 6, 1971. Preparing to fight to the last, the farmers built five fortresses and dug a series of hidden tunnels. According to Abe Nornes, 20,000 protesters reportedly fought with 30,000 cops during the period. Lines of riot police were confronted with not only farmers dug deeply into the earth but also students armed with rocks, sticks, and Molotov cocktails. As Ogawa's film shows with astonishing immediacy, the scene was for all practical purposes a war zone. When not being battered around alongside the bodies of the protesters, who regularly enter into direct, violent combat with the police and other security forces, Ogawa's camera focuses on and takes the side of the farmers, particularly the women who, in the face of very real threats, are willing to use their bodies to protect their land and their families. Over the film's two and half hours, the farmers and students win and lose battles, but despite the superior power the state ultimately shows, Ogawa ends the film with a lyrical, hopeful image of the farmers literally tunneling into the unknown.

Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica: Videograms of a Revolution (1992)

2011-02-18T10:01:00.001-08:00

Farocki and Ujica's Videograms of a Revolution uses video archives to closely examine the role of television in the unfolding of the five most intense days of the 1989 Romanian revolution, which resulted in the overthrow and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu. Using video footage shot by the state television studio and amateur video enthusiasts, Farocki and Ujica provide a linear narrative of the revolution, but regularly stop, rewind, and review important image-events. They persuasively demonstrate that television had a pervasive influence on how the revolution was understood and enacted by its participants. The film opens with a shot of a woman injured in a fight with state security forces. After making sure that the camera is recording her image and voice, she enters into a long, Oscar-worthy statement to the rest of the nation, performing for the camera despite the two bullets in her body that she is waiting for doctors to remove. A key breakdown in the state's control of the media system occurs when protests disrupt a mass rally called by Ceausescu, forcing the state television to go off the air before it returns with its cameras pointed toward the sky, a predetermined response in the case of an emergency. Farocki and Ujica review this footage and use "soft montage"--the placement of a second image within the space of the first--to juxtapose what the state broadcasted and what was recorded by another camera in the area. In his home, a young man films Ceausescu's speech on the television, and then points his camera towards the window to see if the disruptions on the screen correspond to any disruptions in the reality out on the street. When Ceausescu is finally forced to flee the Committee headquarters in a helicopter, Farocki and Ujica show how the event was caught by different cameras at different angles and distances. A different kind of televisual repetition occurs when actions have to be repeated so they can be properly recorded by the television camera, such as when the Prime Minister is forced to repeat his announcement of the government's resignation because the cameras weren't ready the first time. Farocki and Ujica are particularly interested in how during the development of the revolution two focal points, two sites of power, seem to emerge: the square in front of the Committee headquarters and the state television studio. Shortly after the former is attacked, the latter is converted into an instrument of the revolution. As one individual says, "We need the TV." The revolution seems to be performatively accomplished when a crowd gathers in the cramped TV studio and nervously prepares a statement for the nation, after which they are able to say, "The TV is with us!" As Klaus Kreimeier and Benjamin Young have noted, the revolutionary moment opened up a fluid space in which a new kind of media practice thrived, but which quickly disappeared as traditional powers and institutions reasserted control in the following period. Farocki and Ujica argue, "Film was possible because there was history." But they make a seemingly contradictory claim when they say, "If film is possible, then history, too, is possible." Farocki and Ujica don't seem to have in mind reductive arguments about the mass media simulating and replacing history or the mass media as determining history. Recalling what Bernard Stiegler has said about the media being constitutive of what he terms event-ization, one can see through Farocki and Ujica's film how even as a particular political program is being overthrown, media programs remain that influence, and perhaps even help make possible, the individual and collective experience and creation of history.

Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet: Too Early / Too Late (1982)

2011-02-15T15:21:00.000-08:00

Straub & Huillet's Too Early / Too Late is a tranquil and contemplative exploration of time and revolution. The film opens with a peculiar kind of cinematic "revolution"--a six minute shot taken from inside a car that drives repeatedly around a traffic circle in Paris. An off screen voice reads a letter sent by Engels to Kautsky that describes how during the French Revolution the plebians were manipulated into being key agents in what was essentially a bourgeois revolution. The plebians attributed to revolutionary slogans such as "equality" and "fraternité" meanings that were the opposite of what the bourgeoisie intended, so they fought for a cause that was not truly their own. But when their demands eventually were radicalized, such as in the form of Babeuf's violent insurrectionary group, the time for revolution had already passed. Engels writes, "Whereas the Commune with its aspirations for fraternity came too early, Babeuf in his turn came too late." The rest of Engels' letter gives data about the high levels of poverty in different provinces of France at the time of the revolution, so Straub and Huillet accompany this information with filmed images of each location to which Engels refers. Straub and Huillet set their camera at a substantial remove from its subjects and rely almost entirely on long static shots or slow horizontal pans. When accompanied by the lush soundtrack of birds chirping, the wind blowing, and children playing, this structural and spatial distancing frames the landscape as an aesthetic object that can be pleasurably observed. Before one accuses Straub and Huillet of uncritically romanticizing nature, however, it is important to remember that in his letter Engels noted that the regions with the worst poverty were those that "were considered the most fertile." Natural beauty, then, might be read as signifying economic inequality. The second, larger section of the film shifts from France to Egypt. A different voice reads from Mahmud Hussein's Class Struggles in Egypt, which offers a stirring history of Egyptian revolts against western colonizers. The text taken from Hussein's book ends with the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which, like the French Revolution, exemplifies for Straub and Huillet a revolution whose time was out of joint, in this case resulting in a new military ruling class. Throughout, Straub and Huillet's camera scrutinizes the environment for traces of revolutionary movements that never managed to properly arrive. However, recent events in Egypt, the unexpected and untimely nature of the revolution, might change how one understands the film, and particularly its calm surface, by underscoring the contingency of even the most seemingly fixed situation.

Harun Farocki: Workers leaving the factory (1995)

2011-01-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Harun Farocki's Workers leaving the factory is a rich, intelligent investigation of film history and aesthetic "economy." Farocki begins by showing the first film exhibited in public, the Lumiere brothers' Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory in Lyon. Farocki proceeds to read this short silent film, which is situated at the origins of the 20th century and the cinema, by searching in the film archives for variants of this theme of workers leaving the factory. Weaving together documentary footage from Detroit, Lyon, and elsewhere with an astonishing range of scenes from fiction films, including Chaplin's Modern Times and Antonioni's Red Desert, Farocki has created a brilliant film essay that demonstrates how the factory gates have served as a privileged site to which the cinema has obsessively, compulsively returned, though rarely crossed over. He claims, "Most narrative films begin after work is over," and that, "Whenever possible, film has moved hastily away from factories." To illustrate these claims, Farocki juxtaposes scenes from a number of films, showing how the community of workers typically dissolves at the threshold of the factory gates, making room for narratives about the lives (and love affairs) of isolated individuals. Factory gates have often been a site of (filmed) conflict, from strikes to theft, and they therefore have been subjected to developing technologies of security. Farocki pays close attention to the spread of surveillance cameras, which have added a sinister panoptic twist to the Lumiere brothers' foundational gaze. In his essay on the film, Farocki discusses the political unconscious of the Lumiere brothers' film, which is deceptively fascinated with the motion of the workers that eventually leaves the factory still and empty. He writes, "Only later, once it had been learned how filmic images grasp for ideas and are themselves seized by them, are we able to see in hindsight that the resolution of the workers’ motion represents something, that the visible movement of people is standing in for the absent and invisible movement of goods, money, and ideas circulating in industry."

Peter Whitehead: The Fall (1969)

2011-01-23T13:00:00.001-08:00

Shot around New York between October 1967 and May 1968, Peter Whitehead's The Fall reflects the turbulence and chaos of its conjuncture. Visiting from Britain, Whitehead initially offers an outsider's perspective on the antiwar protests, bizarre performance art pieces, and surreal everyday life that he films. Back in his apartment, he obsessively views shocking news reports about everything from the Vietnam War to the rioting in response to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. As psychedelic music plays, a scantily clad model dances around Whitehead's room for far too long and for little apparent reason other than her sex appeal. The first two-thirds of The Fall might be written off as a late-60s bad trip caught on film. Indeed, Whitehead films himself reflecting on his own images and his inability to synthesize the fragments into something more than a "series of historical moments." But this formless document of subjective and political dissolution provides the necessary preparations and context for the film's quite focused and forceful final section on the student revolt at Columbia in April of '68. In this section, Whitehead offers an articulate explanation of the situation on the campus and the reasons for the turn from "protest to resistance." He seems to identify with the students, and shoots freely within the occupied buildings (this footage was later snuck out in one of the buckets used to raise and lower items in and out of a second story window). After a calm series of images of the students sleeping on the floor, Whitehead sits on a window ledge with the occupiers and films the individuals passing by on the street, most of whom offer their own different signals of solidarity with the occupation. At the general assembly, amongst the debate, a very young Paul Auster quietly smiles and smokes a cigarette. At one point, Whitehead sits on the roof of the building and turns the camera on himself, stating in a cool voice that tonight it is known that the police will violently take back the building and that many of the students will be hurt and suspended. A dance party, shot like a music video, takes place shortly before the final barricades are reinforced; later on, from the inside, Whitehead shows these barricades being torn down by the cops entering the building. The actual moment of contact between cops and students is not shown, but Whitehead does take up filming again on the outside as bloodied bodies move off through the night, providing more motivation for the second occupation that would soon occur.

Gillo Pontecorvo: Operacion Ogro (1979)

2011-01-23T11:47:00.000-08:00

Gillo Pontecorvo once again offers a gripping, partisan film about violent revolutionary struggle with Operacion Ogro. In The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo used gritty black and white images to give the film the immediacy and reality of a newsreel. In Operacion Ogro, in contrast, Pontecorvo uses color and professional actors to create a more smoothly suspenseful film, one that doesn't hesitate to use genre conventions (such as those of the heist movie) as a vehicle for its political message (though far slicker, Assayas' Carlos would sit well next to the film). In 1973, near the end of Franco's rule of Spain, a group of commandos from the ETA, a Basque nationalist organization, travels to Madrid to carry out a kidnapping of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, a potential successor to Franco. They spend months planning out the operation only to be frustrated at the last moment when Carrero Blanco's sudden appointment to Prime Minister results in an increase in his security forces. Unable to kidnap the politician, the underground group develops a plan to bomb Carrero Blanco's car on the route by which it regularly takes him to church. It takes the group five months of grueling physical labor to dig a hole deep underneath the street, which is then filled with so many explosives that Carrero Blanco's car is blasted up and over the top of a nearby building. Aided by the marching rhythms of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack, Pontecorvo pulls the viewer into supporting this extreme act of political violence. But he uses a framing device to question the legitimacy of such terrorism, showing the sad fate of one member of the commando group who continues to use violence in the post-Franco era in the name of Basque separatism.

Isidore Isou: Venom & Eternity (1951)

2011-01-15T19:38:00.001-08:00

A confrontational yet essential masterpiece of avant-garde film, Isidore Isou's Venom & Eternity lays out a set of aesthetic innovations and theoretical preoccupations that have been further developed in the films of Brakhage, Debord, and Godard. Deliberately constructed to provoke the audience, the film begins without images, testing the viewer's patience by playing noisy Lettrist music over a black screen for some time before cockily stating, "The film you are about to see differs radically--to put it mildly--from any film ever made any time, any place." On the soundtrack, a young man named Daniel enrages a ciné-club audience by arguing that existing film traditions must be destroyed so that the cinema might be saved. Devoted without reservation to the modernist quest of pursuing the aesthetically new, Daniel admits that the cinema he desires to create might actually be painful to watch, sadistically claiming, "I want to make a film that hurts your eyes." He proposes a new, "Discrepant Cinema," which would free the film's sound from its images. "In my pictures, I would use speech as an extra dimension, supplementing the image as if the sound came from without and did not exist as heretofore because of internal necessity within the belly of the image." This statement describes Venom & Eternity itself, which couples Daniel's vituperative proclamations on the soundtrack with seemingly autonomous images of Isou wandering the streets of Paris as well as footage borrowed from other films. These images are further attacked by often being played in reverse or projected upside down. At one point Daniel states, "One must go beyond the image and attack the film stock," and proposes to "sculpt flowers on the film stock" by scratching it. Isou subjects much of Venom & Eternity to such defacement, which, destructively acting on the material foundations of the film, produces a beautiful and playful new vision. Like the Lettrist poems recited in the film's final section, Isou's film attempts to liberate its medium from the protocols of form and meaning, "chiseling" away at existing conventions so as to uncover and free the materials for a future cinema.

Harun Farocki: The Inextinguishable Fire (1969)

2010-12-15T22:07:00.001-08:00

Harun Farocki's The Inextinguishable Fire protests the production of napalm for use by the U.S. military in Vietnam. The film's blunt political lesson begins in a shocking manner. Sitting behind a table, Farocki reads a statement from a Vietnamese individual describing the experience of being burned by napalm. Aware that the viewer can always close her eyes and block disturbing images from her consciousness, Farocki attempts to convey something of this napalm victim's pain by shifting from filmmaking to a kind of performance art. He suddenly pulls up his sleeve and burns his arm with a lit cigarette, stating: "A cigarette burns at 400' C. Napalm burns at 3,000' C." Napalm instantaneously destroys human skin and dissolves flesh to the bone, so Farocki concludes, "When napalm is burning it is too late to extinguish it. Napalm has to be protested where it is produced, in factories." The rest of the film therefore takes place in the weapon's point of production, a simulated Dow Chemical plant, where actors play corporate scientists who are all-too-willing to commit their skills to making napalm truly an "inextinguishable fire." At one point, the employees of the corporation sit and watch a news report about the war while complaining about boredom. The film comments on the organization of the production process that allows individuals to be so indifferent to the deadly consequences of their own actions: "Because of the intensified division of labor, many technicians and scientists can no longer recognize the contribution they have made to weapons of destruction. Regarding the crimes in Vietnam, they feel like observers." Yet the film concludes that because manufacturing depends on workers, engineers, and students, there are many different agents who can resist the production of destructive weapons and work instead towards benefiting humanity.

Jacques Willemont: The Return to Work at the Wonder Factory (1968)

2010-12-15T16:31:00.000-08:00

The Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, a mere 10-minutes of uncut footage, remains a captivating document of political disagreement and historical reversal (Hervé le Roux has even made a three hour film about the fragment). On June 19th, 1968, after three weeks of striking, the workers at the Wonder factory in Saint-Ouen prepared to go back to work following a union vote to end the strike. A small, politicized film crew from the Institute for the Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) arrived at the factory in time to film the crowd of workers, unions officials, and outsiders that was gathered outside of the factory walls. The smug union officials reassure those present that the decision to return to work is "a victory," a "step" towards something greater. But wandering through the mostly male group is a visibly distraught woman whose performance of radical negativity disrupts the smooth return to work. As the workers begin to disappear by passing through a small door into the factory, what remains with the viewer but disappears from history is this woman's refusal : "No, I won't go back in!" (Subtitled version available here)

Medvedkin Group: Nouvelle Société no 5-7 (1969)

2010-12-13T11:46:00.000-08:00

In these three short newsreel films, the Medvedkin Group, a worker-filmmaker collective, directly opposes French Prime Minister Chaban-Delmas' post-'68 reformist call for a "New Society" based on cooperation and goodwill between the left and the right. Documenting the time-consuming commutes of workers, the destruction of family structures by work schedules, and the causes of industrial accidents, the films reveal French society to be still thoroughly permeated by capitalist oppression and class conflict. In contrast to the government's optimistic vision of a future society that harmoniously integrates the young, the films all open with an image of a girl whose face expresses solemn and militant dissatisfaction with the state of things. Each film ends with the following call for solidarity: "Class struggle exists worldwide. Everywhere, the ruling class invents new masks in order to survive. In France, the latest one is 'The New Society.' We don't believe this. We don't want it. We will build a new society without them, against them, with you." (Subtitled versions of some of the Medvedkin Group's films are available for a trivial cost from Doc Alliance Films)

Medvedkin Group: Classe de lutte (1969)

2010-12-12T11:40:00.001-08:00

In her book on Chris Marker, Catherine Lupton reports that when Marker and Maret's A bientot, j'espere was shown to the workers at Rhodiaceta, their responses were generally positive, though they expressed reservations about the limitations of the filmmakers' perspective. "Marker's response to these criticisms was that he and Marret would always be outsiders to the workers' lives, and that the logical step forward was for them to begin making their own films." Already beginning to form at that moment was the Medvedkin Group, a collective of film technicians and Rhodiaceta workers that would take up this call to advance from "a militant film on the workers' condition to a militant workers' film." The Medvedkin Group's first film, Classe de lutte, closely resembles A bientot j'espere, tracing the development of a young union leader, this time a woman named Suzanne Zedet. But a change of tone and perspective is immediately apparent as the film opens with Cuban musician Silvio Rodriguez's stirring song "La era esta pariendo un corazon" playing over images of workers reflexively viewing images of themselves on the screen of a film editing machine. After this powerful opening sequence, the film turns to footage from 1967, when Zedet, as her skeptical husband points out, was quite isolated in her political organizing. She is unfazed by her relative powerlessness, and when asked, "What are you doing?" she automatically responds: "I militate." When the film picks up Zedet's story in the post-May '68 period, she demonstrates a greater confidence in her speaking and leadership abilities, and the union has acquired enough strength to put management on the defensive. Despite being downgraded to a junior typist as a result of her political activities, Zedet remains committed to injecting politics and class struggle into the workplace. As she expresses her political enthusiasm to the camera, describing her confidence in confronting management as an equal and asserting her right to culture, the film becomes itself evidence of the slogan seen at the beginning of the film on a wall behind the worker-filmmakers, a statement of the Medvedkin Group's political-aesthetic: "Cinema is not magic; it is a technique and a science, a technique born from science and put in service of a will: the will of the workers to liberate themselves."

Chris Marker & Mario Marret: A bientot, j'espere (1968)

2010-12-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

Following the completion of the collective film Far From Vietnam, SLON ("Society for Launching New Works") helped produce Chris Marker and Mario Marret's A bientot, j'espere, a partisan documentary about strikes at the Rhodiaceta textile factory in Besancon in 1967. In March of that year, the workers at Rhodiaceta went on a month-long strike that dramatically transformed their class consciousness. Through interviews and photographs, the film recounts how the workers overcame their prejudices against communism and the unions. Anticipating the spirit of May '68, they painted political slogans on walls and slowly recognized the creative potential of the occupied factory, using its spaces to dance and project movies. Turning to the preparations for a second strike in December, the film presents a young union organizer giving speeches to workers leaving the factory and interviews different workers in their homes. Layoffs, wages, and bonuses are of course concerns for the workers, but they also express a far wider range of grievances, and emphasize their right to culture. They attack the repetitive, mechanical nature of factory work, describe the complete exhaustion they feel when they arrive home after work, express their need for time in nature as a way of counteracting the atmosphere of the factory, and express their unhappiness about the emotional toll the unusual shift schedules take on their marriages. When the December strike finally takes place, the white collar employees refuse to join in, and even the manual workers are divided in their loyalties, leading to the strike accomplishing little of tangible value. But the film optimistically argues the strike was not a failure because "they keep learning," and one of the young union leaders addresses the capitalist class by looking directly at the camera and confidently stating, "we'll be seeing you."

Aldo Tambellini: Black TV (1968)

2010-12-09T21:15:00.001-08:00

Aldo Tambellini's Black TV is an intense, groundbreaking, politically-charged media intervention. Tambellini's earlier works, the magnificent Black Films, were the dark offspring of Isidore Isou and Stan Brakhage, abstract visions of chaos created by defacing and painting on the surface of the film. Black TV critically and reflexively fixes its attention on a different medium--television--but remains equally suspicious of anything resembling direct communication. Using two side-by-side television monitors, Tambellini assaults the viewer with fragmented and distorted images of news programs, race conflicts, war, and aggressive sports competitions. Manipulating the appearance and flow of the black and white images so that they become indistinguishable from the static that regularly bursts onto the two screens, Tambellini unmasks broadcast television's message as white noise that barely manages to repress recognition of the blackness (both racial and visual) that can never be totally eliminated from television's channels.

Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Mieville: France/tour/detour/deux/enfants (1977)

2010-12-01T13:24:00.000-08:00

One of the most remarkable works in Godard's oeuvre, France/tour/detour/deux/enfants, a 12 episode, 6 hour television series, investigates the lives of two children in contemporary France. Each episode focuses on one of the children, Camille and Arnaud, and follows the same pattern. Early in each episode, Godard and Mieville show documentary footage of adults involved in one part of their daily lives, such as working, commuting, reproducing, relaxing, or consuming. Godard and Mieville use the innocent, limited perspective of childhood to express their critique of this capitalist organization of society. The film's title refers to a 19th-century children's book, and something of that genre's mixture of curiosity and fear of the world is echoed in the film's voiceover, which always refers to the adults who are seen as "monsters" while pondering the strange and cruel rules within which they have imprisoned everyone. Following the "monsters" sequence, each episode primarily consists of a very long interview, done in a single take, with one of the children. The immense gap not just between Godard's age and that of the children but also between the children's daily routines and Godard's radical agenda makes these interviews revealing, often troubling, encounters. Godard asks questions that seem simple or ridiculous on the surface, but that have complicated philosophical and political implications that are only occasionally recognized by the children. For example, in an early episode Godard asks Camille if she is sure she exists, and then subjects her to a barrage of related questions, such as whether an image exists in the same way as the object it represents. Sometimes, Godard seems aggressive and cold, as if trying less to interview the children than to force them to think more critically about these issues. But just as often, Godard establishes a casual rapport with the children, who seem quite comfortable, even eager, to be interviewed, not the least because of the relative fame and distinction it gives them at school and among their friends. While rarely grasping the full context of the questions they are asked, whose topics range from wage labor to prisons to revolution, the children demonstrate a number of mechanisms for resisting Godard, such as busying themselves with distractions or indifferently answering yes or no, and occasionally they offer an incredibly original response that clearly was unforeseen by the filmmakers. Quite often, the film shows Camille and Arnaud being disciplined by educational institutions, being taught how to "compose" their sentences, their subjectivities, and their bodies according to the rules set down by society. The children's evasive, unpredictable actions during their interviews, however, indicate an innate unruliness in youth. Near the end of each episode, the interview is interrupted by a male and female reporter (actors standing in for Godard and Mieville), who critique the interview, and then offer a "story" only tangentially related to it, but through which the filmmakers critically examine a number of political issues, including the condemning of women to reproductive functions both at work and at home, the German Red Army Faction's willingness to use political violence, and the vulnerability of the international system of finance to a terrorist attack.

Newsreel: Columbia Revolt (1968)

2010-11-28T20:49:00.001-08:00

This 50 minute politically-engaged documentary on the Columbia University revolt in April 1968 was filmed and released by Newsreel, an experimental film collective formed in 1967. Not as aesthetically sophisticated as the Dziga Vertov group (which included Godard), and lacking the working class constituency and ideology of the Medvedkin Group (with which Chris Marker was associated), Newsreel still made its own relatively important political contribution through documenting and propagandizing the cause of the American New Left. Robert Kramer developed his filmmaking skills as a member of Newsreel, and his masterpiece Ice was created with the assistance of the collective, though the group eventually officially distanced itself from Kramer and his film. Columbia Revolt grippingly captures the energy of the wave of occupations that shook the university shortly before May '68. Revelations about Columbia's involvement with the military think-tank Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) and anger over the university's expansion into Harlem led to a campus protest that turned into an occupation of Hamilton Hall. When African American students asked the white students to leave and form their own protest, the latter occupied Low Library, remaining in the building until police brutally expelled and arrested them. Like William Klein's Grands Soirs & Petits Matins, Columbia Revolt is remarkable for its insider's access to the occupation movement. The filmmakers comfortably move within the occupied spaces and allow the students involved to express their perspectives over the soundtrack. In addition to offering striking images of African American students piling up desks to create barricades inside Hamilton Hall, the film documents the experiment in communal living in Low Library, focusing less on the continuous organizational meetings than on the students dancing and the packed bodies sleeping on the floor. Of course the police eventually arrive and savagely beat each student who is dragged out of the building. The film zooms in on the bruises, blood, and bandages of the over one hundred students injured, but then quickly shifts to the more rousing series of post-occupation protests. (The film is available here: Parts I & II)

Robert Kramer: The Edge (1968)

2010-11-28T17:27:00.001-08:00

Introducing its cast of characters through photographs that seem to have been pulled from the files of the police, Robert Kramer's The Edge quickly establishes its mood of leftist paranoia and conspiracy. The film registers and ponders the growing militancy of the New Left at a moment when draft resistance and other political activities were pushing more and more individuals to break the law, often in a violent manner. What little story there is revolves around a character named Danial Rainer, who boldly announces to a select few of his fellow activists his plan to assassinate the President of the United States. His comrades quickly condemn the idea as both impractical (the Vietnam War will of course continue) and politically disastrous (the subsequent state repression would destroy the left and anyone who once had contact with Danial). Danial agrees with these points, but he continues to talk about his plan, worrying those around him, who are ambivalent about policing one of their own. It takes the rest of the film for Danial actually to attempt to carry out his plan, but in the meantime different characters involved in the underground political network discuss strategies for getting more people involved in the antiwar movement. The hesitancy, confusion, and impotence expressed or exhibited by everyone around Danial clearly motivate his fantasy, which seems to promise to be a self-justifying and immediately-satisfying passage to the act. Irrational as his murderous obsession may be, it catalyzes a thorough, film-length self-examination of the rest of the left, whose members must explicitly take a stand on the question of political violence.

Robert Kramer: Milestones (1975)

2010-11-28T16:42:00.001-08:00

Following the lives of over a dozen individuals as they move about the country, Robert Kramer's Milestones maps the different paths taken by the New Left during the first half of the 1970s. Mixing documentary and fictional modes, Kramer sympathetically observes this collective attempt to articulate new forms of politics in the wake of the 60s. Needless to say, memories of the previous decade's political urgency haunt almost every character. One individual has just been released from prison after serving time for helping draft resisters; another, when meeting with an old comrade, expresses nostalgia for the Days of Rage and The Black Panthers. Fortunately, the film avoids condescendingly attacking that former radicality. For most of the characters, it is isn't a question of giving up politics, but of broadening their conception of it. In contrast to the "dichotomy" in the 60s between political actions and the rest of life, the characters are all seeking in one way or another to prove that "a revolution is not just a series of incidents, but a whole life." The collapse of strong political organizations has left most of these fragile individuals relying heavily on collective love as they rebuild their lives (the emphasis on expressing emotions does perhaps push the film too far into a therapeutic mode). They regularly move in and out of different communal living situations, which range from a pack of "back to the land" hippies to a group of strongly bonded men. Kramer is particularly interested in the problem of politics and the generations. Many of the characters try to repair relationships with parents who were politically estranged in the 60s. And after many scenes of fighting and misery, Milestones ends with a hopeful--and explicit--birth. The film's title comes from a quotation attributed to Ho Chi Minh: "Neither high nor far away, on neither emperor's nor king's throne, you're only a little slab of stone standing on the edge of the highway. People ask you for guidance; you stop them from going astray, and tell them the distance they must journey. The service you render is no small one; people will remember what you've done."

Robert Kramer: Ice (1970)

2010-11-27T23:16:00.000-08:00

Robert Kramer's Ice powerfully conveys the political fervor and paranoia exhibited by the New Left at the moment that certain of its fractions committed themselves to armed struggle against U.S. imperialism. The film blasts open with a multimedia communiqué detailing an ongoing U.S. invasion of Mexico and the efforts of a "collective revolutionary front" to use violence to awaken the political consciousness of the masses (read: The escalation of fighting in Vietnam and Weatherman's response). Using black and white footage of New York City to create a dystopian setting (think of Godard's Alphaville), and borrowing the loose, naturalistic, improvisational style of Cassavetes, Kramer follows some members of a revolutionary collective as they make plans for a "spring offensive," an attack on the state that is being coordinated with other revolutionary groups in the hope of showing the strength of the movement. Though limited by the New Left's Leninist and bureaucratic tendencies, Kramer's film is a unique cinematic investigation of the problem of large scale political organization. Most of the first half of the film consists of meetings, both formal and informal, during which individuals from different revolutionary groups debate every possible detail of the action, from its goals to its timing to the specific tasks to be carried out. These political conversations carry over into more intimate encounters, such as lovemaking between partners; in turn, Kramer doesn't hesitate to critically show how personal issues and limitations can affect or undermine political commitments. When it reaches the night of the action, the film shifts gears into action mode, showing the assassination of an important politician, the freeing of comrades from a jail (and the killing of an informant), and the setting of bombs across the city. Although the film exhibits few if any reservations about the legitimacy of armed struggled, it focuses primarily on the importance of consciousness raising, spending most of its time following a group that raids the "residential zone" and forces its inhabitants to be exposed to revolutionary ideology. This emphasis on communication is apparent throughout the film, which regularly shows the revolutionaries preparing newsreel and propaganda films that are often seen in small snippets or heard in the background. As Ice approaches its non-conclusion, Kramer interrupts the "narrative" with these kinds of political shorts that make more direct political statements, including one film, titled "False Consciousness," which forcefully uses clichés to point out the hypocrisy of every non-revolutionary subject position in society.

Sharon Lockhart: Podworka (2009)

2010-10-21T21:40:00.001-07:00

Sharon Lockhart's Podworka observes the everyday life of children in Lodz, Poland. In a series of long takes, the film juxtaposes urban impersonality and youthful vitality. Lockhart's static camera and distant perspective emphasize the rigid coldness of the city's grey, crumbling, concrete structures. But this formal, photographic detachment is undercut by the personal, cinematic inhabitation of these spaces by different groups of children who move in, around, and out of the space framed by the camera. The remarkable ingenuity, as well as agility, of the children, who transform decaying buildings into playground obstacle courses, not only demonstrates the transfigurative capabilities of youth, but also acts dialectically to underscore that the perspective offered by Lockhart's camera is a constructive, selective one, an aesthetic frame likely quite foreign to the film's subjects.

Ken Jacobs: Capitalism: Child Labor (2007)

2010-10-16T19:08:00.001-07:00

Ken Jacobs's Capitalism: Child Labor is an exemplary experimental film that combines contemporary and obsolete technologies to investigate history, economics, and mediation. The film's material is merely a stereoscopic card showing children working in a factory. Using digital technologies (occasionally revealed to viewers through deliberate pixelization) to alternate quickly between the card's two images, Jacobs manages to achieve 3-D effects on a 2-D plane. In addition to bringing history back to life, Jacobs uses the motion simulated by the oscillation of images to open the archival image up to new forms of inspection, magnifying and approaching small sections from different angles. Jacobs has used this technique in a number of his recent films, but there is a fortuitous convergence of form and content in Capitalism: Child Labor. Aided by a booming soundtrack of industrial noise, Jacobs creates an immediate and unsettling experience of a labor process as inhumanly mechanical and repetitive as the film's back and forth programming.

Hollis Frampton: Poetic Justice (1972)

2010-09-16T20:49:00.001-07:00

An example of the "cinema of the mind," Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice outsources most of its visual functions to the viewer. Directions for shooting a film are placed one at a time on a bare table holding a cactus and a coffee cup. By translating the written text into a mental image, the audience constructs, shot-by-shot, the film that never actually appears on the screen. It is possible to read Poetic Justice as a humanist argument about the brain's superiority as an imaging "technology." But since the viewer still depends on the film for the instructions, it is better to read the work as an exploration of the complex feedback loops between the cinema and its audience. So when one page of instructions describes the shot of the table presently seen on the screen, mental and cinematic images are confronted with each other. In fact, prior experience watching films is essential for being able to correctly follow the directions (if only in one's imagination): cinematic tertiary memory must already be woven into human secondary memory for the imaginative task to be carried out. The written directions describe four distinct tableaux, each of which involves a room, a lover, and photography. Throughout, the photographs (merely referred to but never shown) offer an opportunity for various reflexive commentaries on the cinema itself. For example, in the second tableau, each description of a scene is followed by instructions for shot of a hand holding a photograph of that scene, pushing the viewer, as in Nostalgia, to "recall" an image that was never seen in the first place.

Peter Hutton: Time and Tide (2000)

2010-09-12T23:00:00.001-07:00

Like At Sea, Peter Hutton's Time and Tide is a poetic silent film that extends a painterly aesthetic to a landscape transfigured by industry and technology, the latter including Hutton's camera itself. Hutton begins his film with a reprint of the 1903 silent movie Down the Hudson, which presents as an attraction an accelerated trip through a natural environment already noticeably sculpted by buildings and new transportation networks on both land and river. The rest of Hutton's film returns to and deconstructs that cinematic voyage, at a considerably slower pace, by riding up and down the Hudson on a tugboat pushing and pulling a barge carrying shipments of gasoline. At the start, abstract sheets of ice on the river fracture and slide past the screen. After a short while, the ship ploughing through the ice and introducing this chaos into nature is finally revealed. Through the porthole of the boat, which mirrors the circular peep hole of the silent cinema, factories and docks, the architectural monuments of industry, slowly drift by. Before the ship passes by the Manhattan skyline at night, the Statue of Liberty (and all that it supposedly stands for) is seen as a blur from the rain covered window, the perspective overdetermined by the ship's function of delivering gasoline. Omitting almost any images of humans and submitting to the spatial and temporal scales of nature and industry, Time and Tide offers a beautiful but uncannily impersonal reflection on art and economics.

Wang Bing: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003)

2010-07-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

The linchpin of the Chinese New Documentary Movement, Wang Bing's West of the Tracks patiently observes and archives the decline of the Tiexi industrial district in Shenyang. Tiexi first emerged as an industrial center under Japanese control in the 1930s. The district economically peaked in the 1980s but declined throughout the 1990s as industrial production moved elsewhere. Bing's 9-hour film focuses on the underbelly of such economic "development," illustrating the slow and painful experience of being left behind by "modernization" (which, as China becomes more capitalist, involves privatization). Part I: Rust focuses on those few factories still in operation around the year 2000. With reduced production schedules, tight operating budgets, and smaller numbers of workers, these plants appear as vast, decaying, inhuman spaces. A director like James Benning would be unable to resist succumbing to a formalist framing of the empty factories (with lots of symmetrical shots of the enormous main halls). But Bing is more interested in the workers' experience of economic obsolescence, so he follows the groups of men into the tiny, cramped break rooms, where they change clothes, gamble, talk, and even drunkenly fight. The workers regularly gossip about their plant's impending bankruptcy, complain about the corruption of the government and management, joke about how long it has been since they actually received their salary, coolly point out how poisonous their work environment is, and worry about their pensions and the safety net that motivated them to dedicate their lives to the factories. Their every moment seems haunted by the possibility of being laid off or of the plant being shut down. As one worker tells the camera, "Get this place on film now because it won't be around much longer." This gloomy atmosphere, however, is undercut by the biting humor and vitality of the workers as well as some ironic diegetic music, such as the patriotic songs praising China's future that occasionally play over factory loudspeakers. Eventually, the plants start closing up one at a time, and Bing, with the camera in his arms, physically wanders through the abandoned labyrinths that once were factories. Part II: Remnants moves outside of the factories and focuses on the nearby Rainbow Row neighborhood, where workers' residences are scheduled for demolition. The tiny, decrepit houses are passionately held onto by their tenants, most of whom appear to be laid off factory workers. Bing follows a group of teenagers with no money and no apparent future as they loiter at the local store. The adults meet and complain about the new residences they are being assigned, which will be smaller and charge rent for the first time, and the older residents worry about losing contact with the communities they have spent decades in. But again, "development" moves forward, and the families eventually empty their households on to the streets in order to sell off as much as possible before finally leaving their homes behind to be razed to the ground. An obstinate few try to remain, living and cooking in the dark since the power has been cut off, but they manage to merely delay the inevitable. Part III: Rails rides around on the freight railroad that services the different factories in the district. It includes a gut-wrenching sequence involving an old man and his son who live and scavenge in the railroad yards and become separated when the former is arrested by the police. As the film rides the same rails over and over, the surrounding factories become increasingly empty and desolate. As is the case throughout the film, cinematic duration enables a glimpse of economic time to enter the film frame and be witnessed by the viewer.

Robert Bresson: L'argent

2010-07-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

A fittingly solemn conclusion to Robert Bresson's career, L'argent tracks the destructive circulation of its titular subject. When a spoiled son does not receive enough of an allowance from his wealthy father to pay off his debts, he joins with a friend in passing off a forged bill at a small photography shop. When the owner of the shop discovers the bill is fake, rather than take a loss by reporting it, he passes the bill on to the man collecting the gas bill, Targe, who gets arrested for counterfeiting when he later tries to use the bill at a café. After losing his job, Targe is pulled into an attempted bank robbery (Bresson even makes an attempt at a car chase!), ends up with a prison sentence, during which he loses his child and his wife leaves him, and eventually becomes willing to kill for money. Bresson's "economic" film style, his ability to subtract everything that is inessential from a scene, is particularly suited for observing the impersonal mechanisms that drive the circulation of money. Borrowing a device from Pickpocket, L'argent zooms in on shots of hands - seemingly autonomous from any subjective will - that craftily handle and trade bills, goods, and, finally, weapons. In Pickpocket, the wallets are often returned to their owners' pockets without the money inside. In L'argent, exchange also seems to be asymmetric, so that one side always gains an advantage, debts can never really be paid off, and things can never return to their original state. For example, although Targe has to pay back the amount of the forged bills, he still loses his job, the first step toward losing everything else in his life. In this world dominated by money, not even moral debts can be paid back, as the photography store clerk who perjured himself in court by blaming Targe for the fake bill fails in his attempt to free Targe from prison. By the film's end, Targe realizes that balance and equilibrium can never be restored once money has started to circulate. The only possibility is to take things one step further, even if that means that an old woman's kindness is exchanged for death.

Johan van der Keuken: I Love Dollars (1986)

2010-07-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

An admirable work of cognitive mapping, Johan van der Keuken's I Love Dollars travels to New York, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Geneva in order to explore the disparities and contradictions of the then emerging neoliberal economic "reality" as well to document the hypocritical and often surreal monetary logic generated by the growing hegemony of finance capital. All four cities are financial centers, but each has a singular financial identity because of its place within either the history of capitalism or the current structure of the world system. The film dialectically plays with this tension between the global and the local as it shows different scenes shot across the globe of frenzied trading and financial maneuvering. In each city, Keuken interviews individuals with important positions in the local institutions of financial markets. Thoroughly lacking in modesty and generally ignorant of or indifferent to the devastating consequences of their actions, each individual enthusiastically offers up his personal philosophy of money. For example, one figure, when asked what money is, responds: "money is what creates more money." But through these financial "lessons" and other conversations, the film registers an astonishing number of issues related to financial markets and contemporary economics, including the risky nature of futures markets, the relation of sovereign debt defaults in South America to changes in gold prices, the increased investment attractiveness of new information technologies over more traditional industries, the rise of credit debt to replace declining purchasing power, anxieties over the financing of America's national debt, and the fuzzy conception of the value of the dollar in the post-Bretton-Woods world. Perhaps no other film could as fittingly conclude with a reference to the 1985 Plaza Accord, which saw the deliberate depreciation of the dollar (see Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence for an analysis of the Plaza Accord). Throughout the film, Keuken contrasts this solipsistic, self-referential world of finance with the lives of the poor and disempowered who are most deeply impacted by the abstract and flexible flows of capital. The most extensive and moving of these sequences focuses on Alphabet City in Manhattan, which, like the South Bronx, had been turned into a wasteland of rubble and abandoned buildings by landlords seeking profits through insurance-and-arson schemes. Some hope appears as Keuken shows the local Puerto Rican residents attempting to maintain their community in the face of this destructive monetary onslaught.

Michelangelo Antonioni: Chung Kuo - Cina (1972)

2010-07-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

In between filming Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, Antonioni was invited by the Chinese government to make a documentary about China, which was still feeling the impact of the Cultural Revolution. Chung Kuo, the film Antonioni created after only eight weeks of shooting, was condemned by the Chinese government for failing to meet its expectations for auteur-signed propaganda, and has rarely found its proper place in discussions of Antonioni's oeuvre. (Worth checking out, however, is Susan Sontag's discussion of the film in On Photography, which argues that the Chinese government was entagled in a different [image] economy that took "clichés" to be "correct" views.) At the outset of Chung Kuo, Antonioni makes it explicit that the film is constrained by his domineering Chinese guides and limited to a pre-arranged tour of carefully controlled and choreographed sites and spectacles. The voice-over sets up a tension between what Antonioni would like to show and what he is allowed to show, underscoring the overdetermination of the film's images. More than once, the narrator mentions that other places, not shown, are more impoverished, less beautiful. Antonioni gets around some of this censorship by using hidden cameras, or even at one point ignoring his guides and jumping off the truck and into a crowd gathered at an unofficial market. But his primary critical and creative resource is to make the most of the chance encounters with people on the street who, knowingly and unknowingly, wander within the range of his camera. The film begins in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where enormous murals of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao border the open space still unmarked by tragedy. Antonioni graphically shows the use of acupuncture as anesthesia during a Cesarean section and takes a tour of a heavily mechanized cotton factory. Throughout the film, troops of marching children innocently sing songs about Mao. Later sections of the film explore the organization of agricultural communes in Henan, admire the Venice-style canals of Suzhou, record the technological accomplishment of the bridge in Nanjing, and show the modernity of Shanghai. For the most part (and no doubt exhibiting some Orientalism), Antonioni adds little commentary to these images of a culture he clearly finds fascinating and opaque. But he lashes out when he comes across an elderly woman crippled by the old Chinese practice of binding women's feet, a brutally repressive custom that in some ways figures the Chinese state's confinement of Antonioni's filmmaking.

Peter Hutton: At Sea (2007)

2010-07-01T14:08:00.001-07:00

Perhaps the most timely and essential avant-garde film of recent years, Peter Hutton’s silent tour de force At Sea tracks the birth, life, and death of a container ship. Significantly lowering the costs of international trade, the shipping container “box” has been a vital instrument for the constitution of the current networks of global capitalism. In At Sea, Hutton focuses his camera on the transportation infrastructure underlying the shipping container revolution, offering an important contribution to the cartography of the present. He begins with the construction of container ships in South Korea, a process that takes place on such a grand, epic scale that it seems to have transcended the limits of the humans who appear as specks next to the hulls of the ships. The middle section of the film rides along on one ship as it crosses the ocean from Montreal to Hamburg. Like the photographs of Allan Sekula, Hutton’s film registers the tension between romantic and functionalist approaches to the container ship. Having served in the merchant marine in his youth, Hutton is sensitive to the romance of the ocean voyage and the sublimity of the sea, an aesthetic response with deep literary and visual arts roots. But as the camera looks out across the rainy bow of the ship, the countless stacks of brightly-colored containers underscore the fact that the purpose of the trip is the circulation of commodities, not humans and their imagination. Those economic calculations become more cruelly explicit in the film’s concluding section, which takes place on a shore in Bangladesh, a post-apocalyptic wasteland where, alone on the sand, the ships that have been deemed to be no longer useful are scavenged using dangerous preindustrial techniques. When everything of value that can be removed has been stripped off, the ships are left on the shore like the beached carcasses of whales, decaying, rusty fossils prematurely aged by the fluctuating needs of capital.

Hollis Frampton: Nostalgia (1971)

2010-06-14T23:16:00.001-07:00

Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia generates a mesmerizing, intricate, and ambiguous reflection on time, memory, mortality, materiality, photography, and film through a relatively simple procedure. Frampton slowly places photographs on a hotplate one at a time, allowing the film camera to record the slow destruction of each image. As each photograph burns, he recounts the circumstances that led him to create the image during his early, frustrated career as a photographer, and, fittingly, many of these stories involve lost friendships and the alienating effects of time. But as soon becomes clear, Frampton’s voice describes not the photograph currently seen but the photograph next in line to be set in flames. The viewer is forced to waver between anticipating the destruction of a photograph not yet viewed (a photograph that will paradoxically be at once remembered and seen for the first time) and recollecting the life and history behind the image presently dissolving into smoke and ashes on the film screen.

Gustav Deutsch: Film Ist. 1-12 (1998-2004)

2010-06-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

A provocative and breathtaking investigation of the ontology of the cinema, Gustav Deutsch’s found footage masterpiece Film Ist consists of 12 short chapters each constructed around a different thematic nexus. Film is: movement and time, light and darkness, an instrument, material, the blink of an eye, a mirror, comic, magic, conquest, writing and language, emotions and passion, and memory and document. The project could have resulted in a banal, greatest hits collection of famous film moments (think of the self-congratulatory, sentimental montages shown in the Oscars), but Deutsch has done the necessary archival work, digging through various institutional collections (and even flea markets) in order to recover a lost world of educational, scientific, and silent films, which he has mixed together in a consistently intelligent and bold manner. Rather than emphasize film’s conformity to reassuring humanist clichés, Deutsch, with the assistance of a defamiliarizing noise music soundtrack, revels in illustrating the medium’s essential uncanniness, the perversity and strangeness that has been systematically excised from even the best film histories.

Helke Sander: Subjektitude (1967)

2010-06-08T19:17:00.001-07:00

A concise blast of feminist film making, Sander's first film is a tense yet playful four minute short that dissects a typical urban scene at a bus stop on a busy street in Berlin. Sander adopts a "subjective" camera style, simulating the viewpoints of different individuals, whose inner thoughts are voiced over the soundtrack. As she approaches the bus stop, a young woman ponders the consequences of lowering the voting age to ten years old. This political question is interrupted when her eyes and thoughts drift toward two separate young men who have taken a obvious interest in her. In her thoughts heard over the images, she coolly and critically dismisses the men for their masculine posturing and superficiality. But then the film cuts to the sexist and objectifying perspective of those men, who completely fail to recognize the woman's subjectivity. Before the aggressively charged encounter between the three individuals forces the woman to flee into a taxi, a montage of their perspectives highlights how the experience of the city is strongly determined by gender, which thoroughly permeates all subjectivity.

James Benning: Ruhr (2009)

2010-06-07T22:58:00.001-07:00

Heading overseas to Germany and switching to digital video after a long career using film, Benning pushes structuralist filmmaking towards beautiful yet austere new heights in Ruhr. The film consists of seven fixed shots that lack camera movement and, often, the presence of humans. Like many of Benning's other films, Ruhr is constructed so as to offer a sense of place. Benning allows his camera to linger at a distance for long periods of time on impersonal scenes, making the audience sensitive to the ambiance and rhythms of each location. Benning's aesthetic program greatly benefits from the industrial history of the Ruhr region in Germany, which over the years has generated a new landscape bound to the movements of machines, from airplanes flying overhead to an automated factory silently operating itself to the regular bursts of steam from a coke processing plant. Benning concludes the film by devoting a single, hour-long shot to that coke plant, setting its industrial cycle against the natural cycle of the setting sun.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break (2008)

2010-05-30T22:16:00.001-07:00

Sharon Lockhart's Lunch Break uses a simple but severe formal conceit to investigate the nature of industrial work and non-work. The film consists of a single tracking shot down the seemingly endless Assembly Hall at the Bath Iron Works. This footage has been slowed down so that the result is an 80 minute film, a maddeningly unhurried creep down the hallway. The dilation of time opens up the milieu to intense forms of scrutiny, showing how the segmented and serial production process is expressed in the repetitive structure of the hallway. The film reconsiders the value of this "break," making visible how the workers manage to inhabit this impersonal space and fleeting period of time.

Jonas Mekas: Zefiro Torna (1992)

2010-05-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

One of Mekas's hyperactive "film diaries," Zefiro Torna (the name comes from a Monteverdi madrigal) memorializes Mekas's friend and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, who died relatively young from cancer of the pancreas and liver. Gathering footage from the 1950s to the 1970s, the film shows Maciunas in his personal life as well as documents a number of Fluxus activities on the streets of New York and in various performance spaces. Maciunas of course denied any division between life and art. So when, mere months before his death, Maciunas married Billie Hutching, the couple also held a "Fluxwedding" (caught on film here), during which they stripped in public and exchanged their marriage outfits. As in Mekas's other films, no small pleasure comes from the cameos made by his famous acquaintances, including Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and Shirley Clarke. But this is ultimately a heart-rending and sad work. Mekas's narration not only recounts his own observation of his friend's decline but also relays Maciunas's statements describing his painful physical deterioration and awareness of impending death.

Jan Nemec: Oratorio for Prague (1968)

2010-05-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

Jan Nemec's Oratorio for Prague is a half hour documentary on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Although it frames the events in far too simple and sentimental of a manner (the narration in particular is aggravating), the film provides a nice cinematic counterpart to Josef Koudelka's photos of the invasion (recently published as a book under the title Invasion '68). Oratorio for Prague is reportedly the only film record of the invasion. Nemec was in Czechoslovakia to document the Prague Spring, and the first half of the film shows the startling extent of the liberalization of the country, from the religious freedoms to the growing countercultural movement. But the sudden, unexpected appearance of tanks on the streets of Prague punctures and shatters both this fragile experiment in everyday life and Nemec's humanistic aesthetic. For a few minutes before the film's Dubcek-idolizing ending, chaos rules as socialists confront socialists and blood spills onto the streets.

Harun Farocki: The Words of the Chairman (1967)

2010-05-12T18:44:00.001-07:00

With soon-to-be RAF member Holger Meins as its cinematographer and the feminist filmmaker Helke Sander assisting and providing her voice, Farocki's two minute short, The Words of the Chairman, registers the volatile radicalization of the German New Left. In the film, Farocki literalizes the notion of words as weapons. Mao's Little Red Book is folded into a plane with a pin on its end and thrown at a couple with bags on their heads who represent the Shah of Iran and his wife. The film's argument is so blunt and direct that it deliberately undermines itself, resulting in an ambiguous work. Reflecting more recently on the film, Farocki has claimed: "When I showed this film to the audiences in the late Sixties, it was highly praised. I think people understood then that overobviousness is also a form of irony. This capacity was lost a few years later. I think it's coming back today."

Wang Bing: Coal Money (2008)

2010-05-11T14:06:00.001-07:00

In Coal Money, Wang Bing (best known for West of the Tracks, his 9 hour film on a dying industrial center in China) fixes his keen documentary eye on the coal industry in Inner Mongolia. Taken from an open-pit mine and loaded by machinery onto trucks, the coal at first seems to be a standing reserve, an abundant resource waiting to serve its function in the development of China's economy. But because the coal is used far from its original source, the realization of its value depends on the region's unrefined transportation industry and infrastructure. Wang Bing focuses primarily on the movement of the coal, both its movement across space and its movement between different buyers and sellers. The film patiently observes the continuous haggling over prices, the endless attempts to extract a profit from a world blackened by coal dust.

Jean-Luc Godard: Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (1991)

2010-04-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

Observing reunified Germany a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Godard's Allemagne 90 neuf zéro links the end of actually existing socialism to the death of the cinema and ambivalently contemplates the country's future in a world without alternatives to capitalism. Eddie Constantine, star of Godard's Alphaville, appears as the "last spy," a lost one, who wanders across the German landscape in search of a West that no longer exactly exists now that the Cold War has ceased. The film's melancholic ruminations on history float across the disjunctive and opaque narrative. Godard's "late" style weaves together old film clips that have been dilated and interrogated through video, scenes of the wet and cold German winter, and hauntingly elegiac classical music. The affective impact of this and Godard's other recent films is no doubt due in part to his access to the ECM record label's excellent catalogue and to the increasing sophistication of his editing skills, which seem to take as their model no longer the brutal assault of the machine gun but rather the complex interaction of the string quartets that so often feature in these films.

Marin Karmitz: Coup Pour Coup / Blow for Blow (1972)

2010-04-07T22:38:00.001-07:00

Coup pour coup reenacts a wildcat strike at a textile plant in rural France. Produced in a democratic manner, the film mixes actors with real workers playing themselves and falls somewhere between being a documentary and a work of fiction. When it was first released, many critics thrashed the film, preferring the formal experimentation of Godard and Gorin's Tout Va Bien. Those objections hit on some serious issues with the film's simplistic aesthetic, but can't negate its rousing populist power. In the film, a group of women workers confront the inhuman discipline of some foremen who have clearly taken the principles of scientific management to heart and walk around in lab coats while holding stop watches. After a series of minor sabotage efforts, two women are fired, prompting a spontaneous strike. The union immediately attempts to contain and take control of this autonomous action, but negotiations by a male union representative are ignored when the women call for occupation. Because they fulfill both productive and reproductive functions, the women face specific gender issues during their three week occupation of the plant. Their husbands are forced to suddenly cook and take care of the children, and eventually a makeshift nursery is started in an abandoned boss' office. The women eventually catch the plant's owner on the site and lock him in a glass office, where he is subjected to the arbitrary rules of the workplace that oppressed the women. One attempted takeover by the police seems to be thwarted because the hired muscle is hesitant to strike women. And as sympathy strikes spread through the region, the government, also fearing the consequences of sending the riot police against women, orders the owner to submit to the workers' demands.

Larry Jordan: Visions of a City (1957/1978)

2010-03-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

Shot in San Francisco in 1957 but not completed until 1978, Jordan's 6-minute Visions of a City flows from the city's thriving Beat culture and even features the poet Michael McClure. A "vision" rather than a documentary, the film approaches the reality of the city only through its reflection on a series of different surfaces, from shop windows to passing buses to bottles in the street. Urban space becomes layered and distorted, abstracted and liberated, but the effect is due as much to poetic inspiration as to the unplanned optical technologies that are the city itself.

Jean-Michel Carré & Adam Schmedes: Le Ghetto Expérimental (1975)

2010-03-29T23:01:00.001-07:00

Carré and Schmedes' Le Ghetto Expérimental is a documentary on the experimentation with education and everyday life carried out at the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes during the 1970s. One of the most substantial institutional products of May '68, Vincennes at this time had a notoriously revolutionary ambiance, and Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and numerous other politicized intellectuals taught at the school. The film focuses primarily on the students' political activities, which are visible everywhere, from the political slogans painted on the assembly room halls to the constant discussions held in the school's dining halls and courtyards to the revolutionary tracts found next to pornography on the bathroom stalls. The directors emphasize the cultural experimentation made possible by the school, showing classes on free jazz vocal improvisation, students editing films from footage of May '68, an agit-prop theater group rehearsing, and a half naked dance group producing sculpture from malleable human bodies. These scenes demonstrate the attempt by students to actually embody a revolutionary way of life. Carré and Schmedes also take a tour through the different student political organizations, including Marxist-Leninists making posters and pamphlets, anarchists working on Situationist-style comic book propaganda, and feminist groups both formal and informal. While acknowledging the chaotic and contradictory nature of Vincennes, Le Ghetto Expérimental gives its viewers a glimpse of what a truly autonomous education might look like.

Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet: Sicilia! (1999)

2010-03-25T14:44:00.001-07:00

Based on an Elio Vittorini novel, Sicilia! follows a Sicilian, Silvestro, who returns (presumably in the late 1930s) to Sicily after 15 years in the United States. At once a native and a stranger, Silvestro converses with the different people he meets about this homeland that is no longer exactly his home. He discovers a country full of poverty and political tensions, and even his exchanges with his mother become strained when he asks about her leaving his father. The film concludes with one of Straub-Huillet's greatest scenes, in which Silvestro meets a knife-grinder. Beginning as a formal market transaction, the scene turns into a profound encounter between two individuals, one that is made all the more powerful by Straub-Huillet's aversion to expressive acting.

Harun Farocki: Wie man sieht / As you see (1986)

2010-03-25T14:17:00.001-07:00

Wie man sieht is a film essay on mechanization, automation, and computerization that underscores the military and managerial interests that guide most technological innovation. Throughout the film, Farocki cites his intellectual sources by filming the covers of their books, showing works by Hannah Arendt, David. F. Noble, and others, but he makes no mention of Virilio, whose concerns with mobility, machinery, and the military Farocki clearly shares. Farocki loosely weaves together a number of different thematic threads in the film. One thread surveys the relation of machines and modern warfare from the machine gun to the trenches of WWI to the invention of the tank. Another thread traces the roots of the digital computer back to the Jacquard loom and argues that the development of automation has served capitalist interests by eliminating the need for labor. But Farocki scatters throughout this pessimistic history of the machine efforts to create "alternative technologies" that serve the community and the workers, and he casts doubt on the nature and necessity of technological "progress."

Fassbinder, Kluge, Schlondorff, et al.: Deutschland im Herbst / Germany in Autumn (1978)

2010-03-10T18:53:00.000-08:00

Like Loin du Vietnam a decade earlier, Germany in Autumn weaves together contributions by different directors in order to make a political intervention in ongoing events. The titular season refers to late 1977, when the Red Army Faction (RAF) / Baader-Meinhof Gang kidnapped and eventually killed the industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in support of the RAF hijacked an airplane, and the imprisoned leaders of the RAF - Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe - apparently committed suicide in their cells. Much of the body of the film is clumsily didactic: Fassbinder flagellates himself on film for half an hour, Kluge gets too cartoony, and the other documentary footage is of uneven quality. But the film is essential viewing for the two funerals that bookend it. Germany in Autumn begins with footage of the official pomp and spectacle surrounding the lavish funeral service for Schleyer. It ends with the far less orchestrated funeral for Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. The film documents how difficult it was to find a burial place for these three, who, despised by the state and most of German society as inhuman "terrorists," had been denied any place in the German soil. While police on horses observe, the funeral service takes place with a large group of leftists (many hiding their faces from the cops and reporters) in attendance. The film concludes on a sentimental and optimistic note, burying the tactic of violence but not the aspirations of the left.

Sergei Loznitsa: Fabrika / Factory (2004)

2010-03-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

Loznitsa's half hour documentary on a Russian factory presents a stunning view into an industrial hell. As if lifted straight from the 19th century, the factory is dark, dirty, and populated by a horde of mechanical monstrosities that seem to enslave the workers who attend to them. Perhaps a commentary on the stagnation of the development of productive forces under socialism, the film also testifies to the continued presence of supposedly "primitive" forms of production in contemporary capitalism (I doubt anyone has ever uttered the word "postindustrial" anywhere near this factory). There is no dialogue in the film, and even if there were it would not be audible over the masterfully-recorded industrial noise that assaults the viewer throughout.

Louis Malle: Humain, trop humain (1974)

2010-03-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

Humain, trop humain is a documentary on the Citroen auto factory in Brittany, France. The film is constructed in a formally simple manner and does not offer any commentary on what it shows, yet it presents an effective criticism of the absolute divide between the realm of production and the realm of consumption. The film begins by moving through the factory and tracking the steps through which the cars are built. During this section, the film moves at a brisk pace and manifests something like a narrative arc. But as soon as we reach the final stage of production, the film cuts to the dramatically different world of the auto showroom. The cars now become reified commodities, fetishized objects whose origins have been lost, and the audience is subjected to the most superficial and loathsome discussions of potential consumers about the value of the cars. In the last section, the film returns to the factory. This time, however, there is no clear organization, and Malle emphasizes the repetitive, serial nature of mass production on the assembly line. The film deliberately tests the audience's patience by bluntly illustrating Marx and Engels' claim in The Communist Manifesto that in the modern factory the worker "becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him [or her]."

Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet: En rachachant (1982)

2010-03-07T21:12:00.000-08:00

A short 7-minute film based on a Marguerite Duras text, Straub-Huillet's En rachachant is an extraordinary assault on the ideology of education. In the film, young Ernesto comes home one day and announces he will not return to school because "at school they teach me things that I don't know!" Pressed for more explanation, he claims, "It takes too long to learn things" and "it's not worth learning." When he is examined by his teacher in front of his bewildered parents, Ernesto never wavers in his rejection of all official forms of education. Although his teacher reassures his parents that Ernesto will eventually have to become realistic and begin to learn, Ernesto maintains his radical position of refusal.

Jean-Luc Godard: Un film comme les autres (1968)

2010-02-23T19:46:00.001-08:00

Shot in August of 1968, Godard's Un film comme les autres extends the revolutionary spirit and speech of May '68. In a field on the outskirts of Paris, six workers and students sit together under the bright sun and discuss the events of May and the prospects for continuing the struggle. Godard chooses not to show any of their faces, detaching the voices the audience hears from the bodies they see and reinforcing the non-hierarchical nature of the group and its conversation. This militant "circle" discusses the value of the trade unions, the importance of spontaneous action, the limits of legal forms of protest, and the legitimacy of insurrectionary violence. The most heated topic is student-worker unity, as different individuals dispute the relation of university occupations to strikes, condemn the "privileged" status of students, and contest claims about the undeveloped class consciousness of workers. Inserted into this film-length debate is black-and-white footage of May '68, including images of mass marches, confrontations with the police, and student assemblies at the Sorbonne. The film originally fit on two 16mm reels, and reportedly the order of reels was to be determined by the projectionist through a coin toss and the second reel was to be shown only if the audience voted to see it.

William Klein: Grands soirs & petits matins

2010-02-22T22:44:00.001-08:00

A rousing 90-minute documentary on May '68, William Klein's Grands noirs & petits matins observes both students and workers protesting in the streets and the activities of the various assemblies and committees within the Sorbonne. Although it risks reifying and fetishizing the revolutionary past, the film offers an invaluable and comprehensive vision of this rupture in everyday reality. Klein gained such exceptional access to the Sorbonne by chance. In an interview elsewhere, he states that he was smoking outside a suburban ciné-club when "a bunch of students from the Sorbonne came by and said, 'Listen, we’re sick of having all these camera crews come to the Sorbonne and say, ‘We’re Dutch or Norwegian television,’ we don’t know whether they’re cops or not, so we want to have Cinema Sorbonne. Who would be willing to be Cinema Sorbonne? I was standing there and I said, 'I’ll do it.'” The film covers the last week of May and the beginning of June, so it focuses less on the origins of the revolutionary movement than on the difficulties of maintaining it in the face of growing internal and external divisions. Except for intertitles that briefly note the date and location, the film lets the footage speak for itself, and speak it does. For the entire 90 minutes, people restlessly debate the reformist limitations of the unions and the Communist Party, argue over whether workers or students "lead" the revolution, and bark out messages to noisy crowds. René Viénet's Enragés and Situationists and Gregoire & Perlman's Worker-Student Action Committees are rather helpful for understanding the context of these discussions, as well as for clarifying the organization of the various groups that Klein wanders into in the Sorbonne. Of course the film shows a number of general assemblies, but it also documents different action committees making plans in meetings (Marguerite Duras even appears on one committee) or carrying out everyday necessities within the occupied university, such as providing childcare, preparing food, and schooling adolescents in revolutionary theory.

Helma Sanders-Brahms: Under the Pavement Lies the Strand (1975)

2010-02-19T22:49:00.001-08:00

Taking its title from a slogan painted on walls during May '68, Sanders-Brahms' film dramatizes from a feminist perspective the tensions in 1970s Germany between the personal and the political. Those expecting "entertainment" will find the film too didactic, even clumsy and blunt. Those who treat the cinema as an occasion for thought will find the film provocative and rewarding. Accidentally locked inside their performance space one night, Grischa and Heinrich, actors in an experimental stage production of a Greek play, use this unexpected exile from everyday life to start a relationship together. Though the film explicitly illustrates the utopian core of their sexual passion, both Grischa and Heinrich continue to face difficulties reconciling their political activism during 1968 and 1969 with their current existence, which is divided between work and leisure, politics and private life. Heinrich, who is rather infantile and selfish, is seen reading Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, but as he emotionally drifts away from monogamy he also loses interest in direct political engagement. Grischa, however, spends her free time doggedly recording interviews of working women about their lives, paying particular attention to reproductive issues such as abortion. Her commitment to politics as a way of life takes its toll on their relationship in both affective and practical ways, yet the film offers no easy solutions to the problem of harmonizing political activism and domesticity in a capitalist society.

Chantal Akerman: J'ai faim, j'ai froid / I'm hungry, I'm cold (1984)

2010-02-15T18:28:00.001-08:00

At the beginning of Akerman's short film, two runaway girls arrive in Paris from Brussels. They are, of course, hungry and cold. Akerman constructs a humorous and subversive narrative by reducing the girls to those bodily desires for food and warmth, desires that are blind to social conventions and ethical inhibitions. The girls eat almost continuously in the film, and no amount of food seems to satisfy them. Though Akerman uses this insatiability for comedic effect, there are also strong feminist motives for so unreservedly displaying women absorbed in eating. Unable to actually afford their moveable feast, the two girls sing, steal, and/or sleep their way to their next meal, their naivety indiscernible from sociopathy.

Serge Bard: Détruisez-vous / Destroy Yourselves (1968)

2010-02-08T10:33:00.001-08:00

Opening with the title, "A film shot in April 1968," Serge Bard's Détruisez-vous captures on film the militant dysphoria that would explode only a few weeks later. A dropout of the University of Nanterre, Bard reportedly shot some scenes at the school, which was the starting point of the events of May '68. In the film, Caroline de Bendern, a British model from a wealthy family who would later be disinherited because of the iconic photo of her as "La Marianne de Mai '68," plays a young woman who is somehow mixed up with the internal conflicts of a revolutionary cell. As others have noted, the film, which was the first Zanzibar production, is a combination of the screen-test aesthetic of Warhol's Chelsea Girls and the political diatribes of Godard's La Chinoise. De Bendern's character wanders around and discusses revolution with a friend/comrade (played by Juliet Berto, who also appeared in La Chinoise). She is also interrogated or lectured at by different male militants, and her responses largely consist of repeating what some man has told her (though the gender politics are a serious issue, there is room to support claims about her feminine resistance to this hyper-masculine mode of political discourse). These political discussions have some evident intellectual shortcomings, but the film successfully conveys an atmosphere of revolutionary hope and dread. The film's title refers to a phrase painted on the walls of a school during May '68: "Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous." As one character says, "Don't respect anything except the things that go past your limits, take you far away, and allow you to forget everything, to lose everything you once were."

Alexander Kluge: In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death (1974)

2010-01-28T13:28:00.001-08:00

Combining fictional and documentary modes, Kluge's In Danger and Dire Distress... takes a critical stance toward Frankfurt's public sphere and urban redevelopment. Despite the serious formal and political concerns of the film, Kluge's heightened sense of the absurd safeguards a reserve of utopian optimism. In the film, Inge, a prostitute, perversely uses sex to steal, lifting the wallets of her clients as they are lost in sexual pleasure. Rita is an obstinate communist spy who is reprimanded by her superiors because her reports tend to be poetic narratives rather than collections of useful facts. Both women separately wander through Frankfurt while the Carnival is occurring and revelers parade the streets. Astonishingly, Kluge's camera and his actors encounter the police evicting squatters from a building. After the large force of cops empties the building, a demolition crane tears it down. The excess of state power is perfectly illustrated when the crane is used to attack the squatters' banner that is hanging on the building; the state takes time to destroy this fragile message before proceeding to pull down the building itself. A related protest is unnecessarily set upon by the police, and rioting overtakes the streets and the film as protesters hurl objects at police hiding behind water cannons.

Jean-Marie Straub & Daniéle Huillet: Not Reconciled, or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (1965)

2010-01-26T18:33:00.000-08:00

Straub-Huillet's Not Reconciled traces the historical forces that contributed to the rise of Nazism and that continued to be unconsciously at work in postwar German society. Through extreme narrative fragmentation and condensation, wildly disjunctive editing, and angular and elliptical imagery, Straub-Huillet represent German history as a set of geological layers whose unreconciled coexistence constitutes the present. The film draws from Heinrich Boll's Billiards at Half Past Nine, which tracks the lives of three generations of a family of architects. However, Straub-Huillet keep Boll's text at a distance, cutting its narrative so greatly that it requires great viewer effort to make any sense of what is seen on the screen. In addition to the film, the actors are not "reconciled" with Boll's novel. They retain their own corporeal existence by non-expressively reciting their lines and often letting their gazes drift away from the scene. The film starts with a seconds-long shot of a man playing billiards who says, "Tell what, boy?" before it jarringly cuts to another scene and leaps back in time without announcement. Little that follows is more smoothly organized. By confronting the violent and unpleasant facts of German history while refusing any temporal cues or transitions and granting both actors and text their own reality, Straub-Huillet offer a discontinuous, complex, and politically explosive image of the present.

Alain Resnais: L'amour a mort / Love Unto Death (1984)

2010-01-26T16:41:00.001-08:00

L'amour a mort begins with a traumatic scene of death. As the body of her lover, Simon, lies on the bedroom floor, Elisabeth sobs and frantically runs around. A doctor arrives, pronounces Simon dead, and leaves to get an ambulance. Before Elisabeth can even register what has happened, a phone call intrudes and then . . . Simon walks down the stairs in seemingly perfect health. As an archaeologist, Simon in one sense has always been obsessed with death. But after his resurrection he becomes convinced that he is dead. Despite the theological debates he has with his minister friends, Simon can't help but wander toward death. His near-death experience strangely causes his relationship with Elisabeth, whom he has known only briefly, to intensify. As Simon is drawn closer to death, her love takes a peculiarly morbid turn. L'amour a mort skirts the edge of the horror/thriller genre and is atypically linear for a Resnais film. But Resnais brilliantly breaks up the narrative flow with abstract shots of snow falling in the night while the haunting music of composer Hans Werner Henze plays. Meant to stand in for the unrepresentable experience of death, these shots don't so much oppose the life on screen as make possible its creative becoming.

Philippe Garrel: Elle passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights (1985)

2010-01-20T20:31:00.001-08:00

Garrel's extraordinarily beautiful but excruciatingly difficult film hovers on the border between fiction and reality. It begins with a devastating scene of two lovers about to separate that sets certain narrative expectations. But the couple's last-moment reconciliation is quickly undercut by the woman's drug addiction, which makes it impossible for their relationship to move forward. Like in many of Garrel's films from this period, the memory of Nico both drives and haunts the film. In Elle passé..., Garrel confronts and reflects on the difficult process of mourning, the impasses of memory, and the creative resources of autobiography through meta-fictional techniques. In addition to flicker effects and black segments that remind the viewer that she is watching a film, Garrel includes himself as a director trying to make the film we first see. Frustrated with his film, this on-screen Garrel even consults with his director friends Chantal Akerman and Jacques Doillon. As Elle passé... develops, the weaving of its layers becomes increasingly complex and free from the original narrative situation. Garrel often returns to his earlier experimental style by using intimate close-ups without any sound. Gradually, the barrier between fiction and reality is dissolved and the film's achingly beautiful images become something else. As Deleuze writes in The Time-Image, Garrel offers a cinema that "coincides with its own essence, at least with one of its essences: a proceeding, a process of constitution of bodies from the neutral image, white or black, snowy or flashed."

Eric Rohmer: Le signe du lion (1959)

2010-01-19T18:43:00.000-08:00

Rohmer's first feature-length film, released at the start of the French New Wave and before any of the films of his "Moral Tales" cycle, is unique within his oeuvre. Le signe du lion focuses on a middle-aged German-American expat named Pierre, who completely lacks the eloquence of Rohmer's later characters. Having faith in luck, not hard work (yes, that is a reference to astrology in the film's title), Pierre believes he has finally won the jackpot when he receives a telegram informing him he has inherited a large sum of money from an aunt. But Rohmer's dramatic contrivances push Pierre not into a life of luxury but onto the streets of Paris as a penniless and homeless bum. The film functions as a kind of negative of Rohmer's later films: while his friends head off for reporting jobs and vacations in distant locations, Pierre is stuck wandering the city during the height of the summer heat. Shooting on location, Rohmer puts all of Paris on display as he tracks Pierre's increasingly desperate path to the bottom. In juxtaposing urban spectacle and squalor, Rohmer illustrates how the lovely stones of Paris function as both attractions and barriers, the only difference being the amount of money in one's pocket and the caprices of luck.

Philippe Garrel: Le révélateur (1968)

2010-01-03T21:21:00.000-08:00

Shot in the aftermath of May '68 in the dark forests of Germany, Garrel's remarkable silent experimental film projects an atmosphere of menace and persecution. A young couple and their child run through a deserted landscape as if pursued by unseen forces. Much of the film was shot at night with a moving spotlight held on the actors as if they were animals caught in a car's headlights or fugitives fleeing from the state's roving gaze. When they find temporary forms of shelter, the parents turn upon each other, reproducing the conflicts of the external world. In contrast to the frantic, desperate activity of his parents, the child playfully responds to these circumstances, indicating that a better world is still possible. Perhaps Garrel's greatest movie, Le révélateur articulates personal and political anxieties in an opaque yet expressive vision.

Robert Bresson: Le diable probablement / The Devil, Probably (1977)

2009-12-21T19:17:00.001-08:00

Bresson's unsparing study of nihilism follows the last days of Charles, a modern-day "underground man." Charles repudiates the comforts of a bourgeois lifestyle, acts indifferent toward the two women who desire him, and scorns the hypocrisies of organized religion. Aware of coming "too late" for the revolution, he rejects all politics and considers the leftists of the 1970s to be nothing but "fools." Charles even shows little interest in his friend's activism in the emerging environmental movement or in the drugs another friend is addicted to. The film opens with news reports of Charles' suicide, so there is never any doubt where Charles' ennui is heading and the film continuously projects a mood of doom as it slowly marches toward death. Bresson's reserved style might be considered the antithesis of that of the countercultural milieu, and the fit is admittedly awkward at first. But in the final scene, in which Charles asks a friend to shoot him in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, Bresson's reductions allow him to create an expression of absolute bleakness and despair.

Marguerite Duras: Détruire dit-elle / Destroy, She Said (1969)

2009-12-19T21:29:00.001-08:00

In Duras' near-perfect film, a professor, his young wife, a middle-aged woman recovering from a miscarriage, and a pensive Jewish outsider meet on the grounds of a rural hotel. While the other guests are out seeking a supposedly magnificent view that the film has no interest in showing, these four explore the destructive potential of their desires. Though the pastoral setting and stillness of the film belie its origins, Duras' work emerged from her experience of May '68. The ambiguous "love" the four characters come to express for each other is communist in the best sense and deeply antagonistic to the fixed identities and hierarchical power structures of the outside world.

Dziga Vertov: Sovietskie igrushkie / Soviet Toys (1924)

2009-12-18T22:30:00.001-08:00

A communist Christmas message for this degraded holiday season (check out that Christmas tree of solidarity at the end!), Vertov's short animated film attacks the persistence of capitalist "fat" within the new socialist State. If only Walt Disney had been a communist. The unrealistic freedom of animation is clearly a medium well-suited for imagining an alternative to capitalist "reality." The film gleefully assaults the institutional "bodies" that parasitically live off of the working class.

Alexander Kluge: Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin / Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (1973)

2009-12-18T21:59:00.000-08:00

In Kluge's excellent film, Roswitha performs illegal abortions in order to support her family because her moody husband refuses to subject his idealistic scientific research to commercial interests. Unlike Godard, Kluge does not abstractly use women's bodies to figure capitalist economics: Kluge includes a gruesome scene of an abortion, even filming the medical instruments being casually tossed on top of the discarded fetus after the procedure is finished (in other words, viewers be warned). A run-in with the State forces Roswitha to abandon her work and motivates her husband to get a job with a corporation. Freed from working (but not from her constant and uncompensated duty of caring for the family), Roswitha becomes involved in political organizing, naively pursuing her political passions even though they directly conflict with her family's self-interest. Throughout the film, Kluge includes brief montage sequences that aim less to construct a definite meaning than to offer viewers a chance to make enormous imaginative leaps.

Helke Sander: Die allseitig reduzierte Personlichkeit / The All-Round Reduced Personality (1978)

2009-12-17T22:18:00.000-08:00

In this unduly forgotten masterpiece, Sander stars as Edda Chiemnyjewski, a single mother who barely scrapes by a living as a freelance photographer. Edda is a member of a small group of women photographers that has accepted a commission to photograph Berlin. Refusing to limit themselves to traditional feminist concerns (the bureaucrats expect the group to simply present images of women workers in Berlin), these women investigate the uncanny porosity of the Berlin Wall and encounter potential repression and censorship by the bureaucratic forces that are sponsoring their activities. The themes of photography and collective feminine production are clearly commentaries on Sander's cinematic praxis. The film is refreshingly composed of independent women autonomously organizing to carry out aesthetic and political tasks. Sander also offers many of her own long shots of Berlin and the Wall, and her film is a far smarter inquiry into the dilemmas and divisions of Berlin than Wenders' overly sentimental Wings of Desire. Most importantly, the film's radical aesthetics and explicit political concerns avoid pretension or conceit by being clearly grounded in existing feminist forms of organization.

Helke Sander: Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure / Break the Power of the Manipulators (1967/68)

2009-12-17T14:11:00.001-08:00

In the late 1960s, the Springer media empire launched an assault on the German radical student movement. When popular student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot in 1968, the Springer press was blamed and protests outside of the publisher's buildings turned violent, resulting in cars being burned and the deaths of two students. Filmed in the midst of these events, Sander's film didactically exposes the distortions of the Springer press and draws its methods from the new organizational forms emerging out of the student occupation movement. The first half of the film, which moves slowly, portrays government bureaucrats and industrialists coldly voicing out loud the conservative dogma printed in the Springer papers they are reading. The film eventually turns to students planning and discussing "counter-publicity" aimed against the Springer press. Sander frames the film as an extension of the experiments in grassroots organizing occurring in the student movement, and the final section of the film expands its focus and documents the diverse activities of the students occupying what I presume to be Berlin's Free University.

Alexander Kluge: Abschied von gestern / Yesterday Girl (1966)

2009-12-16T21:03:00.000-08:00

In Yesterday Girl, Kluge, a former student of Adorno, unravels the contradictory foundations of consumer culture. In the film, Anita G., a young emigré from East Germany, is unable to discipline her desire to immediately appropriate - usually through illegal methods - all the commodities that postwar West German society oriented itself to producing and marketing. Despite the efforts of various characters to give Anita an "education" - that is, to teach her the self-restraint suitable for life under capitalism - she remains a perversely pure embodiment of uninhibited consumer desire, a figure transgressively uncoupled from any work "ethic." Nomadic by nature, Anita is so hounded by the institutions of the State that she has nowhere left to flee but into the heart of the government's disciplinary apparatus.

Jean-Luc Godard: 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1967)

2009-11-28T20:38:00.000-08:00

Though nearly undermined by its facile equation of prostitution with consumerism, 2 ou 3 choses is redeemed by the non-narrative direction Godard takes while documenting the development of "elle"/Paris. Around the same time, Italian operaists such as Raniero Panzieri were decrying the "neocapitalist" integration of the city into totalized forms of economic planning. While taking aim at the rapid expansion of the commodity-world (the final shot is of a set of branded products lying in the grass), Godard's film also reveals how construction on Paris' periphery heralded a new urbanism more conducive to supposedly "modern" consumer lifestyles. From shots of construction zones to the soundtrack of heavy machinery, the film is continuously concerned with how the Paris of the 19th century was, as one character notes, in the process of being remade for the era of radio and television.

Godard, Resnais, Varda, Marker, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch: Loin du Vietnam (1967)

2009-10-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais contributed (unidentified) segments to this cinematic expression of solidarity with the North Vietnamese. Chris Marker reportedly weaved the segments together, and some of the footage from Loin du Vietnam also shows up in his The Grin Without a Cat. Beginning and ending with eerily calm scenes of missiles and bombs being loaded onto jets on an aircraft carrier, Loin du Vietnam traces the history of the Vietnam conflict, documents the ingenious resistance of the North Vietnamese, interviews Fidel Castro about guerilla warfare, and portrays the increasingly violent conflicts the war was creating within American society. Resnais' contribution is a long winded and utterly uncinematic rant, but Godard uses his contribution to examine his own politicization. Over shots of himself at the camera and images from La Chinoise, Godard describes how his political commitment had made him desire to move to Cuba or Algeria to make movies, but when North Vietnam rejected his request to visit Hanoi he came to realize that he could best serve the fight against imperialism by continuing to work within France. The pro- and anti-war demonstrations in the United States are the most gripping sequences in the film. Present at the protests are conservative whites defending the war, young members of the increasingly confrontational New Left, and highly visible Puerto Rican and African American militants. When an anti-war protest in downtown Manhattan provokes a group of Wall Street types to murderously start chanting "Bomb Hanoi!," the film (perhaps Marker) can't help but cut to images of individuals and families living in Hanoi, to the everyday life that distance had reduced to an abstraction to be bombed.

Koji Wakamatsu & Masao Adachi: The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971)

2009-10-05T21:59:00.000-07:00

In The Red Army/PFLP, Wakamatsu and Adachi use documentary footage of the life and training of members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as propaganda aimed at creating a world revolution. Both directors were closely involved with the Japanese Red Army Faction and interacted with the PLO not just as filmmakers but also as militants committed to armed struggle. Whereas Adachi reportedly remained and fought with the PLO for decades, Wakamatsu soon after distanced himself from radical violence (his recent The Red Army even reduces the demise of the Japanese RAF to a sadistic genre plot). The thesis of the film, which is often repeated, is that armed struggle is the best form of propaganda, an argument which effectively reduces cinema to being merely a supplement to radical political practice. The film begins with the Japanese RAF hijacking an airplane, and then cuts to the PLO hijacking and destruction of a group of planes (the planes were empty). The film narration claims the work is a "news film for the construction of a world Red Army," a film aimed at showing how "weapons are the language of oppressed people." Aesthetically, The Red Army/PFLP is thoroughly non-dialectical: it fetishizes weapons, providing ample close-ups of bazookas and repeatedly demonstrating the everyday place of weapons in the lives of Palestinian militants. Indeed, through contrast, the film might serve as proof of the intellectual and aesthetic independence Godard retained throughout the Dziga Vertov period. But if the film is non-dialectical, it is also a limit point of radical aesthetics. I have seen no other film that so purely identifies with and subordinates itself to the goals and practices of the militant and armed Left.

Pierre Clémenti: Visa de censure numéro X (1967)

2009-09-25T22:06:00.000-07:00

Whereas Clémenti's shorter, better, La révolution n'est qu'un début. Continuons, combines psychedelic culture with the politics of May '68, Visa de censure numéro X operates without any such political reference point. Pursuing a maximalist aesthetic that overloads every frame with sensory data and a pulsing psych-rock soundtrack, Clémenti seeks out the radical implications of the counterculture's libidinal economy. This is basically a proto-music video, but one whose appealing radical chic - and who wouldn't be attracted to the stylish, globetrotting lifestyle on display? - does not negate the power of its aesthetic density.

Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, Haskell Wexler: Underground (1976)

2009-09-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

A rather unusual case of radical political filmmaking (though perhaps less remarkable on aesthetic terms), Underground consists mostly of interviews with members of the Weather Underground while they were fugitives hiding from the law. Among the Weathermen included are Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, and Bernadine Dohrn, all of whose faces are hidden from the viewer for security reasons. Wexler and de Antonio had strong credentials as radical directors (the former for his masterpiece Medium Cool, the latter for his much older anti-McCarthy film), but as the Weathermen remind them, an immense gulf separates politicized aesthetics from political violence. Footage of The Days of Rage, the Greenwich Village explosion, and other Weather bombings is mixed in as the members of the Weather Underground critique their macho posturing in 1970, praise the role of the organization's female members, and examine the rest of their brief history of violent struggle.

Agnes Varda: Black Panthers (1968)

2009-09-18T12:19:00.001-07:00

Varda's half hour documentary on the Black Panther Party centers on a "Free Huey" rally held in Oakland. The film combines footage of the rally and Black Panther training exercises with interviews with Panther leaders such as Huey Newton (speaking from his jail cell about solitary confinement) and Kathleen Cleaver, who passionately defends the group's militancy. Varda is clearly sympathetic to the Black Panthers' politics, but she restrains her efforts as a director in order to let the Panthers speak for themselves. If anything identifies this as a Varda film, it is its attentiveness to the role women and feminine rhetoric (the camera repeatedly zooms in on the hands of women as they talk) played in the organization and vitality of the often excessively-masculine Panther party. (The film should not be confused with the black and white documentary available on the ubuweb, which reportedly was not made by Varda)

Alain Robbet-Grillet: Trans-Europ-Express (1966)

2009-08-19T14:33:00.001-07:00

In Trans-Europ-Express, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Elias, a novice smuggler working for a criminal organization that transports drugs between Antwerp and Paris on the titular train service. Because Elias is new, the organization tests his loyalty and skills by tricking him and giving him fake assignments that don't involve any real drugs. The line between reality and illusion is further blurred by the fact that Robbe-Grillet himself appears on the train and recognizes Elias as the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. Robbe-Grillet discusses with his travel companions a film about drug smuggling that exactly resembles the one being shown, and as he revises the script by deleting scenes and rewriting the plot, the film that Trintignant/Elias stars in changes as well. This kind of meta-fiction may be old news today, but the film's sense of humor, stylish settings and cinematography, and sexual quirks give it an appropriately light touch. For example, like Robbe-Grillet, Elias (who otherwise is a void of a character) enjoys S&M, and he meets his downfall when the police fool him with a newspaper advertisement for a burlesque show.

Pierre Clémenti: La révolution n'est qu'un début. Continuons. (1968)

2009-08-16T23:45:00.000-07:00

A short, silent work that combines psychedelic aesthetics and radical politics, La révolution n'est qu'un début. Continuons. was directed by Pierre Clémenti, who starred in films by Bunuel, Bertolucci, Pasolini, and Garrel. Clémenti, who fashioned himself something of a revolutionary, was in Italy in early 1968 working on Bertolucci's Partner, but when the events of May '68 broke out, Bertolucci sent him back to Paris to scope things out. Clémenti filmed a number of the clashes and reworked this and other personal footage using the color-saturated and visually-dense style of psychedelia. Though the color schemes and drug-influenced sensuousness of the film do not fit the ascetic model of political filmmaking, one should go beyond superficial aesthetic prejudices (no, a fondness for fluorescent colors is not anti-political) and recognize Clémenti's film as a minor yet valuable work that updates the style of Vertov.

Marguerite Duras: Nathalie Granger (1972)

2009-08-16T19:33:00.001-07:00

In Nathalie Granger, two friends (Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosé) go about their day in a house (it is not clear whether they live together), performing domestic tasks such as cleaning off kitchen tables and sewing clothes while listening to radio reports about two underage murderers. One of the women's daughters, Nathalie Granger, has been recently expelled from school for violently assaulting a classmate, and her mother has to choose whether to send her off to a repressive boarding school or to make a home for her destructive desires. Duras has clearly stripped the film of all plot and drama in order to allow a set of feminine concerns to be displayed. Yet the domestic space to which the film limits itself is suddenly invaded by masculinity in the form of a washing machine salesman (Gérard Depardieu) who lets himself in. This inept salesman receives a devastating rejection from the two women, who in one sense destroy him through the simplest form of feminine negativity: the word "No."

Miklós Jancsó: Red Psalm / Még kér a nép (1972)

2009-08-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

Red Psalm might be considered a tightly-choreographed socialist musical that portrays revolution as a natural audio-visual spectacle. Based on a 19th-century Hungarian peasant revolt, the film shows an unruly collective of peasants singing, dancing, and disobeying the military forces that have been brought in to suppress them. Jancsó imagines the peasants' rebellion as a (relatively) spontaneous emergence of a dynamic socialist group. Rejecting the equation of montage with radical aesthetics, Jancsó constructs the film out of a series of outrageously long traveling shots. His camera tracks the continuously changing order of the peasant group, whose bodies weave in-between and rub against the troops that eventually massacre almost everyone involved in the uprising.

Jacques Rivette: Merry-Go-Round (1981)

2009-08-09T23:03:00.000-07:00

In Merry-Go-Round, Rivette uses a mystery/thriller narrative as a springboard for improvisational filmmaking. Joe Dallesandro (whose physique was made world famous in Warhol's films) and Maria Schneider (who starred in masterpieces by Bertolucci and Antonioni) are strangers who cross paths in France while looking for the same woman: her sister, his ex-girlfriend. They eventually join together in a search for a lost fortune, but continue to distrust each other: the film regularly cuts to fantasy sequences in which the two attempt to murder each other. The mystery is genre nonsense, but it allows Rivette to treat the film's various sets as obstacle courses through which to send Dallesandro and Schneider running. The two don't so much act as physically perform for the camera (to be honest, the acting is rather sub par). The film begins with and often returns to a pair of musicians who improvise the experimental music that plays on the soundtrack. Like that music, the movements of Dallesandro and Schneider (at least while the genre narrative is held at bay) don't mean anything, but manage to generate their own internal logic and momentum, giving the film a loose flow that is a pleasure to view.

Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville: Comment ca va? (1978)

2009-08-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

Godard and Miéville reflect once again on the semiotics of the image in Comment ca va? Two workers for a communist newspaper spend their evenings discussing and editing a film they are making on the production of the newspaper. As in Ici et ailleurs, the woman critiques the man's complacent and unquestioned political aesthetic. Viewing a straightforward documentary segment the man has edited without her consent, the woman - whose face is never shown - claims they don't know how to see anything, not even the typewriters that are being used by the (female) workers in the film. She claims, "what is unseen is what directs," and that unseen is "the look." The two of them proceed to investigate the act of typing and then exhaustively interrogate the meaning of a single photograph. When their film is complete, however, they find that the local communist organization, despite its promises, has chosen not to disseminate their work.

Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville: Ici et ailleurs (1976)

2009-08-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

In 1970, Godard and Gorin traveled to Palestine and Jourdan and filmed the PLO in training. Shortly after, many of the individuals the two filmed were killed and the PLO responded with some spectacular forms of violence (i.e., taking hostages at the Munich Olympics). Five years later, Godard and Miéville pour over this footage, comparing it with images of a French family. Their starting point is a rather blunt contrast between the French family's safe consumption of the images broadcasted on their television and the - retrospectively clear - mortal risks faced by the PLO. But an extended analysis of images, politics, and history ensues, and the film shows elements of the poetic film essay style that would fully emerge in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Near the end of the film, Miéville's voice comes to dominate the discussion. She rather devastatingly critiques Godard's images and directorial decisions, laying waste to the aesthetic of the Dziga Vertov Group without damaging its political intentions.

Philippe Garrel: Les hautes solitudes (1974)

2009-08-03T19:58:00.001-07:00

Garrel's silent film consists almost entirely of images of the faces of Nico, Jean Seberg, and Tina Aumont. Intimately and intrusively pursuing these iconic faces without any narrative support, Les hautes solitudes could be interpreted as exploiting for critical-experimental ends what Laura Mulvey, around the same time, derided as the cinema's patriarchal "gaze," which is drawn toward women as "spectacles" yet wary of the anti-narrative quality of their images. Garrel's primary subject is Seberg, whose visible aging and (perhaps acted) confrontations with and flight from the camera presents a stark contrast to her visual function in Godard's Breathless at the very outset of the New Wave. Garrel supposedly planned on adding music, but changed his mind when Seberg praised the silent cut he showed her. She committed suicide only a few years later, so it is hard not to approach Garrel's film as an attempt to unveil Seberg's feminine subjectivity that in fact recorded only the traces of its withdrawal from sight.

Chris Marker: Le fond de l'air est rouge / Grin Without a Cat (1977)

2009-08-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

Marker's three hour film, which is not to be confused with his execrable video The Case of the Grinning Cat, takes as its subject the radical politics and social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Starting with the Vietnam War and the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, the film moves on to May '68 in France, protests in Chicago and Washington D.C., and the Soviet crack-down on the Prague Spring. Throughout the film, Marker primarily performs the role of archival researcher, discovering and incorporating a seemingly endless stream of astonishing footage. For three hours, unruly bodies are shown in violent conflict with various forms of political repression. Leaping across the globe from one struggle to another, the film observes the revolutionary potential of crowds and masses as well as the state's often brutal assault on that potential. Marker's film ultimately mourns the passing of the radical political urgency it cinematically recovers, yet its images, especially in the light of the disparate protests across the globe in the last year or two, remain a vital refutation of the idea that a certain form of political protest and struggle "in the streets" should be considered obsolete today.

Philippe Garrel: The Birth of Love / La naissance de l'amour (1993)

2009-07-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

Starring two famous New Wave actors, Lou Castel and Jeanne-Pierre Léaud, and shot by Raoul Coutard, the brilliant cinematographer of Godard's early films, Garrel's La naissance de l'amour is not merely New Wave in its spirit but also in its mode of production. The film continues the delicate tone of Garrel's previous film, J'entends plus la guitare, subtly attending to the confused emotions of its aging male protagonists. The narrative centers around the middle-aged Paul, who, when his long-term mistress leaves him, quickly picks up a much younger mistress and leaves his wife, son, and newborn child. His decision is selfish and cruel and the love he shows for his new mistress is perhaps far beyond what she innocently is capable of reciprocating. Plaintive piano music plays in the background throughout as the film, rather than judging Paul's actions, attempts to comprehend the sadness of the aging masculinity on display.

Dziga Vertov Group: Wind From the East / Le vent d'est (1970)

2009-07-20T15:26:00.001-07:00

More Maoist political film-making from Godard as part of the Dziga Vertov group, Le vent d'est comes across as an extended version of the last section of Godard's Weekend. For the first half of the film, two voices read letters describing and debating the progress of a factory strike while a group dressed up in period costumes wanders through the countryside and allegorically represents the class struggle. The last half of the film positions itself as an autocritique of the first half, prescribing further education in Marxist-Leninist theory and examination of the concrete conditions of the working class. At various points, the film explicitly presents a history and theory of the idea of revolutionary cinema, praising Vertov over Eisenstein, rejecting "Stalinist images" for being complicit with bourgeois ideology, and attacking Western films for being "Nixon Paramount" productions.

Alain Resnais: Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)

2009-07-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

In this minor film, Resnais uses the genre of science fiction to rework the formal innovations and preoccupation with time and memory found his earlier films such as Muriel or Last Year at Marienbad. The narrative situation, clearly influenced by Chris Marker's La jetée, involves a man who has just recovered from a failed suicide attempt being used by a secret organization in a time travel experiment that will send him back one year in time for one minute. Of course the experiment goes awry, and the man finds himself forced to re-live the key moments leading up to and following the death of his wife, who either died of an illness or was murdered by him. The rather hokey apparatus of science fiction (which may try the viewer's patience) is merely an excuse for Resnais to see how far he can go with disjunctive editing and non-linear storytelling in a feature film. Je t'aime, je t'aime lacks the mystique of Marienbad and the emotional pull of Hiroshima mon amour, and Resnais' successful assault on narrative convention may very well have made the kind of experimentation found in this film appear clichéd in retrospect (need I mention Groundhog Day as an example of how Resnais' innovations have worked their way into the Hollywood system?). But Je t'aime, je t'aime may remain of interest precisely because it straddles the fence between the modernism of Resnais' earlier films and the populist accessibility of his later ones.

Dziga Vertov Group: Pravda (1970)

2009-07-19T17:20:00.001-07:00

Perhaps the most formally simple of Godard's films with the Dziga Vertov Group (Gorin reportedly did not play much role in its production), Pravda is a film essay that criticizes the failures of communist Czechoslovakia. Theoretically, this is one of Godard's most purely Maoist films, being explicitly framed as a "concrete analysis of a concrete situation." Over documentary images of life in Czechoslovakia (particularly Prague), "Vladimir" (Lenin) and "Rosa" (Luxemburg) attack various forms of Soviet bureaucratic reactionarism. Traces of both the Prague Spring and the military's squashing of it are visible in the film, from the presence of Western businesses and advertising to images of Soviet tanks being used to discipline peasant workers. Pravda and the rest of Godard's films with the Dziga Vertov Group have some significant theoretical and aesthetic limitations. But these limitations differ for each film, revealing a dialectical process at work underneath the political propagandizing. Perhaps today viewers are again intellectually and politically ready to approach Godard's "political" films, each of which demonstrates a singular articulation of theoretical and cinematic practice.

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin: Struggle in Italy / Lotte in Italia (1971)

2009-07-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

Another Marxist film by Godard and Gorin as the Dziga Vertov group, Struggle in Italy examines the contradictions between a young militant woman's political activities and her bourgeois environment. Interestingly, Althusser's writing on ideology is the central theoretical reference for the film, so the political monologue that runs continuously on the soundtrack is quite recognizable. In the first half of the film, the young woman's militant subjectivity conflicts with the different subject positions - student, lover, and daughter - that she occupies. Despite her political commitment, she is unable to resolve these contradictions in her life. A theoretical and practical breakthrough occurs only when she recognizes that ideology is an imaginary relation to the real that functions to reproduce the relations of production. As she learns this lesson, the film re-examines the scenes of interpellation from its first half, substituting images of factory production for the black spaces that formerly had neutrally conjoined the contradictory regions of the militant's life.

Jean Eustache: Mes petites amoureuses (1974)

2009-07-18T18:59:00.001-07:00

Eustache's semi-autobiographical follow-up to his scandalous The Mother and the Whore traces the rather unsentimental education of a young boy named Daniel. Living in rural France with his grandmother, Daniel manages to make the most of the limited attractions of his surroundings. But when Daniel's mother forces him to move in with her and her lover in the south of France and orders him to give up his schooling for an apprenticeship in a motorbike garage, he quickly adapts to the existence of an adult. Observing his new environment closely, Daniel prematurely acquires the sexist, predatorial habits and diminished horizon of possibilities of his working class peers. Truly a sad, unique masterpiece about a subject - childhood- that far too often is trivialized by sentimentality and nostalgia.

Jackie Raynal: Deux Fois (1968)

2009-07-18T13:28:00.001-07:00

Raynal, a member of the Zanzibar group (along with Philippe Garrel and Patrick Deval), edited a number of Eric Rohmer's early films, most notably La Collectioneuse. Deux Fois, her first directorial effort, dives into the deep end of the avant-garde. The film opens with a long take of Raynal herself eating and drinking. When she finally stops, she directly addresses the camera and says: "And now you will see a young girl in a train. Then I will tell you a few short stories. Then, we'll move on to the pharmacy sequence. At the end there will be a real fall. For the sequence about the man, we will see simultaneously an extreme close-up of the sky, some birds, a city square, the man in the street, a sleeper, the dreamer. We will also see a city, an unidentifiable place, everyday conversations. Tonight will be the end of meaning." That pretty well summarizes what follows, which manages to engage the viewer without burdening the film's documentary, confrontational, and occasionally surrealist images with the duty of conveying too much meaning.

Olivier Assayas: Cold Water / L'eau froide (1994)

2009-07-17T22:54:00.000-07:00

Returning to the 1970s of his youth, Assayas in Cold Water takes seriously the resistance of youth to the modern protocols of maturation and discipline. This might be considered an art-house version of Dazed & Confused that omits the annoying high school "types" and does not automatically understand teenage discontent as a supposedly "healthy" form of rebellion that occurs on the way to adulthood. Assayas' fluid hand-held camera busily pursues his nomadic youth, rendering their environment as a diffuse field of obstacles and attractions. Assayas uses the same style in his most recent films to figure the flows of global finance capital, the economic dissolution of locality and materiality through speed. In Cold Water, however, youth's mobility is ambivalently portrayed as destructive: Assayas' teenagers break windows, slash train seats, play with dynamite, and generally fail to adjust to any adult position in capitalist society. Whereas Assayas' most recent film, Summer Hours, optimistically ends with a house party that demonstrates that the kids are alright, Cold Water centers on a party literally fueled by the destruction of real estate.