Event overview
FIVE COMMUNES
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.
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 XXth 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.
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (dir. Peter Watkins, 2000, 300 min.)
Guest speaker: Dr. Ros Gray
Peter Watkins explains the recuperation of the Paris Commune for a film in the year 2000 as follows: ‘We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the conjunction of postmodernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking in the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalization, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where commitment is considered old fashioned. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.’
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Feb 2012 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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