Event overview
This programme of screenings and discussions brings together films that commemorate and/or seek to re-activate the events of the Paris Commune (1871) and its political lessons.
FIVE COMMUNES
Curated by Manuel Ramos.
ABOUT
The events of the Paris Commune, the first workers’ power in history, have inspired a century of revolutionary thought (from Bakunin to Luxemburg, from Marx, Lenin, Mao to Badiou). Its constitution and its obliteration have been at the core of the main political debates of the Left throughout the XXth century. In the 1960s the Commune became the historical event privileged by militant thinkers opposing the conventions of the established Left and its fixed theories about the right revolution. For the Situationists to study the Paris Commune meant ‘to contribute to a radical critique of Stalinism and, more generally, of the bureaucratic phenomenon’. Since then, a myriad of thinkers and activists have repeatedly recuperated the Paris Commune against the absolute privilege of the Russian model of ‘successful revolution’ and for the articulation of a politics of emancipation different from Left party traditions. Since May 68, and again since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Paris Commune has become not so much the model but the key historical event for different analyses and practices re-thinking and experimenting a politics-without-Party. In a word, the lessons of the Commune have been re-interpreted in order to to re-invent the sense(s) of the political.
The cinema has been largely absent from these debates. The Commune has in fact very rarely been addressed by the cinema, it has proven a particularly complex and colossal subject with various failed projects throughout the 20th century (most notably Jean Grémillon’s). This programme brings together a few exceptions that reconstruct, evoke or address in very different socio-political circumstances what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871. These different approaches (an early French militant film, a poetical experiment, a Soviet film, a cinematic semi-comic revue and a theatrical re-enactment) develop different viewpoints and techniques, putting forward different interpretations of the episodes they address. But also, they make visible different capacities of the cinema to approach a historical event, different ways of articulating its function of preservation (a question of memory) and its powers of re-activation (a political question). The intention of these screenings is to discuss again the events of the Paris Commune in relation to our present and to contribute to re-think the capacities of the cinema to intervene in it.
SESSION ONE – January 13th 2012
La Commune (dir. by Armand Guerra, 1914, 20 min.) and Toute Révolution Est un Coup de Dés (dir. by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1977, 11 min.)
Guest speaker: Louis Henderson, filmmaker
La Commune (dir. by Armand Guerra, 1914, 20 min.)
The film is a reconstruction of the episode that triggered the Paris insurrection in 1871. The film was produced by the Cinéma du Peuple, a film production worker’s cooperative which heralded the development of militant cinema initiatives later incarnated by the Groupe Octobre of the 30s and the leftist cinematic groups at the end of the 60s and 70s. The film includes exceptional documentary shots showing former communards, and ends with a flag bearing the inscription ‘Long live the Commune’.
Toute Révolution Est un Coup de Dés (dir. by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1977, 11 min.)
The film offers a recitation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s homonymous poem and proposes a cinematic equivalent for the author’s original experiment with typography and layout by assigning the words to nine different speakers, separating each speaker from the other as she or he speaks, and using slight pauses to correspond with white spaces on the original page. The film is shot near the wall of the Père Lachaise cemetery where 147 Commune fighters were shot and buried in May 28 1871 during the violent repression of the Commune.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Jan 2012 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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