ECOS DE MEIA OITO NO CINEMA

12 min readMay 14, 2018

: MOURIR A TRENTE ANS (Romain Goupil, 1980)

Romain Goupil’s Mourir à trente ans (Half a Life, 1980) is an elegy for his longtime friend and former student leader Michel Recanati, who committed suicide in 1978. The film offers a somber meditation on revolutionary disappointment. Although the personal and political had combined in the ’68 years, at a distance from May, personal tragedy seemed one outcome of a failed revolution. There was no longer a movement to keep alive or kick-start. “Mourir à trente ans leaves no doubt,” writes Smith, “that the past is buried. The elation experienced remains only a memory, and the projection of memory onto present experience leads at best to a weary nostalgia which engeders no action and at worst, with Michel, to despair.”⁷[BOURG, 2013:551]

BOURG, Julian.,Nostalgia in Recent French Films on the ’68 Years | IN SHERMAN, Daniel J., Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder, e A. AneeshT., he long 1968 : revisions and new perspectives Indiana University Press, 2013

Louis Malle gleaned a different lesson from the passage of time in his Milou en mai (May Fools), namely, humor.⁸ The film, which appeared in 1990, a decade after Mourir à trente ans, tells the story of a family who reunite in the countryside for the funeral of their recently deceased mother. It happens to be May 1968. The burial is postponed because the undertakers are on strike. The characters, for the most part conservative, follow the events on the radio, then flee into the forest out of fear that society is collapsing. The distance between the events in Paris and the tranquil pastoral setting reinforces the sense of detachment from the ’68 years. Malle’s comedy of manners ridicules the neurotic domestic intrigues of the middle class, but it also targets the exaggerations and speculative fantasies surrounding what turned out to have been the nonevent of 1968.” [BOURG, 2013:551]

“ In contrast to Goupil’s message of despair as the Mitterrand era opened and to Malle’s satirical wink just after the events’ twentieth anniversary, a strikingly different tone was set by Hervé Le Roux’s Reprise (1996). Appearing a year after the massive 1995 labor strikes — the largest and most significant social movement since 1968 — Le Roux’s film took as its point of departure a famous ciné- tract filmed toward the end of the May events. The ten-minute La reprise du travail aux usines Wonder (Return to Work at the Wonder Factory) depicts an anonymous woman on the street yelling at her coworkers and the camera crew. Angry and overwrought, she is deeply upset that their strike has ended with too many conces- sions, and she declares her refusal to return to work. Her inconsolable emotion stuns those around her into silence. Le Roux set out in the mid-1990s to track down this woman and her coworkers who appeared in the 1968 film. The message is clear: 1968 has been lost and needs to be found again, the personal is meaningful in the context of class and labor, and a woman’s guttural rage at unresolved injustice echoes across the intervening thirty years.⁹ Le Roux’s Reprise can be seen as part of a larger movement in 1990s French film known as jeune cinéma, or new social cinema, that brought a resharpened critical gaze to French social issues and in which 1968 sometimes figured as a touchstone.”[BOURG, 2013:551/552]

MEIA OITO NO CINEMA: Continuidade dos 1960S E 1990S-2000S

To some extent the search in France for continuities between the 1960s and 1990s-2000s has reflected a response to the rightward political shift between the presidential elections of Jacques Chirac in 1995 and Nicholas Sarkozy in 2007.¹⁰ The 1995 strikes were succeeded a decade later by spontaneous riots in 2005 and organized protests in 2007–2009. With a sustained “neoliberal” dismantling of social welfare entitlements (les acquis sociaux) under way and the electoral Left consistently in disarray, the early 2000s witnessed a growing interest in 1968 both as a historical precedent of popular protest and as a foundational date for the era in which France has continued to find itself. (The annus mirabilis of ’68 has no rivals in recent French history for symbolizing a beginning or an end.) The two films discussed below — Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers and Christian Rouaud’s Lip: Imagination in Power — fit squarely in this conjuncture. [BOURG, 2013:552]

It is worth noting that the fortieth anniversary of the May events in 2008 witnessed an unprecedented publishing and media frenzy. The numbers of analyses, documentaries, and memoirs simply dwarfed those of earlier decadal commemorations. The publishing avalanche was largely self-involved and glossy: parents explaining ’68 to the children of ’68, collections of photos, confessions, historical minutiae, and derivative essays.”[BOURG, 2013:552/553]

The film Nés en 68 (Born in ’68, 2008) spans the entire forty years since the May events and shows in tragicomic terms a new generation pursuing its own social activism in fits and starts before hitting the wall of sarkozisme.

Documentaries claiming objectivist finality — Patrick Rotman named his documentary ’68: The Official Film — were plentiful.¹¹

SARKOZISM

Public debate during the fortieth anniversary received an unexpected boost from criticisms of 1968 made during the 2007 presidential race by then candidate Sarkozy, who infamously declared that he wanted to “liquidate” the inheritance of 1968. According to him, it is an inheritance of relativism, cynicism, the rule of money, and individualism — in other words, exactly the opposite phenomena advocated by the radical protagonists of May.¹² [BOURG, 2013:553]

Sarkozy’s comments, summoning the perennial French fear of decline, struck a cultural-political chord, and the reverberations were considerable. Now, more than forty years after 1968, a surprisingly commonplace view holds that the events had involved cultural transformation and sociopolitical failure. Issues of mores, lifestyles, and personal meaning have become commonly divorced from memories of social movements and political mobilization. Calls for a return to the social history of 1968 and the forms of sociopolitical contestation it represented are decidedly marginal. [BOURG, 2013:553]

“ he sixties involved overlapping cultural, political, and social elements, but in French historical memory, we see, on the one hand, a centripetal process that reduces an era to one year and even to one month and, on the other hand, a clear centrifugal process that has separated features that were once combined. The ’68 years were a moment that exceeded the effervescent eruption of May. [BOURG, 2013:553/554]

In Regular Lovers and Lip: Imagination in Power, the divided cultural and sociopolitical interpretations of that era appear in stark contrast. Two very different visions of the crucial protagonists, motivations, and meanings of 1968 are on display.

FILMED at a leisurely pace in what one reviewer called an “impos-sibly luminous” black and white, Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers is an homage to the New Wave cinema of the director’s youth.¹³ One scene, and apparently only one scene — in which the protagonist, François, hides from the police on building rooftops in the middle of a night of street riots in May 1968 — refers directly to Garrel’s own experience.¹⁴ Instead of explicit biography, the film aims to capture and personify the ethos of an era, both the meandering, po- etic, and irreverent cinema of someone like Jean-Luc Godard or Jean Eustache and the political-cumpersonal experience of the ’68 generation. What’s new in Garrel’s film is his emphasis on the post-1968 counterculture and how fleeting political militancy gave way to extremely individualized and largely depoliticized searches for personal meaning. In the course of its highly stylized three hours, Regular Lovers presents a distant, almost phantasmagorical depiction of 1968 seen from nearly forty years later. [BOURG, 2013:554]

The film was generally lauded by critics. In spite of complaints by English-language reviewers about the lack of engaging narrative (“a thin smear of plot”) and great length (“the film’s slow tempo induces the feeling that one is living through the whole of 1968 in one sitting”), Regular Lovers was cheered as a “magnificent film, “an amazing, redemptive experience,” an “epic slacker movie,” a “long prose poem,” and “a poignant, rhapsodic glimmer of what was, and what will never be.”¹⁵ The French press was even more effusive. Didier Péron in Libération called it a “three-hour Baude- lairean crossing” from which “one emerges less simple-minded, cleansed, less of an idiot, and more pure.” Critics for L’humanité and Le monde evoked Gustave Flaubert. Others referred to it as “one of the most beautiful French films of the new millenni- um . . . a filmed poem,” and “a fervent hymn to an entire mythol- ogy of the cinema, to this pagan cult for which Garrel today is one of the most inspired prophets [nabis].”¹⁶ In a sign of cinematic eventfulness, the flagship of French film criticism, Les cahiers du cinéma, dedicated an entire dossier to the film in its October 2005 issue and the following month showcased a rare interview with Garrel. “Regular Lovers impresses first of all for its unparalleled ambition in contemporary French cinema,” wrote Stéphane Delorme.¹⁷ Overall, one suspects that some English-language critcs for whom New Wave cinema is part of standard film literacy were delighted to see intimations of a classic form. French reviewers, in contrast, on the cusp of the fortieth anniversary, faced the first major effort in a long while to dramatize 1968. In spite of such glowing praise, however, the precise structure of the film demands somewhat more searching analysis and critique.” [BOURG, 2013:554/555]

“François and his eventual lover, Lilie, are positioned at the cen- ter of the circuitous story (figure 12.2). Having glimpsed one an- other on the barricades in May, they meet at a party, stay up all night talking, and ritualistically become involved. We see them get- ting to know one another, chatting about nothing, opening them- selves up to one another about their passions (he, poetry; she, sculpture), and eventually moving in with one another.

Dramatically, the crux is that Lilie, though deeply in love with François, finds her own voice and independence in an almost sud- den decision to move to New York with an older man who has promised to help with her artistic career, presumably in an effort to seduce her. In the end, François, who has already alluded to death and suicide at various points throughout the film, kills himself with an overdose of pills, thus bringing to a diremptive finale the prom- ise of the barricades with which the film began, a promise, how- ever, that along the way has been displaced in the postpolitical, opium-induced artistic retreat in which François and his friends find themselves in late 1968 and 1969.[BOURG, 2013:555]

CHRISTIAN Rouaud’s Lip: Imagination in Power tells the story of the famous 1973 strike at the Lip watch factory in Besançon, France. The company was founded in the late nineteenth century and epitomized the French industrial model of finely crafted quality goods. After World War II, Lip pioneered technologically advanced time- pieces, which were worn by the likes of Charles de Gaulle and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Although there had been labor struggles at the factory in the years immediately prior to 1968, by the early 1970s a financial restructuring of the company led to mass firings and to the possibility of the company being closed for good. Lip: Imagination in Power is a documentary that relies largely on present-day testimony from participants, although it is peppered with archival footage from the era. It describes events between the April 17, 1973, “panic” at the factory — when the Swiss parent firm Ebauches (forerunner of Swatch) began the process of liquidating the company’s assets — and the February 1976 dismissal of the poststrike, reformist director Claude Neuschwander. In between, one of the most celebrated experiments in modern worker self- management, or autogestion, transpired.” [BOURG, 2013:566/567]

“Worker self-management was one of the great fruits of the 1968-era ethos of direct democracy. With precursors in nineteenth- century anarchosyndicalism, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the 1930s Spanish Revolution, worker self-management attempted to apply democratic principles and structures to the workplace. Hierarchy and bureaucracy were targeted in small-scale operations that attempted to reshape labor and production according to the criteria of egalitarianism, participation, and shared responsibility/shared benefit. After 1968 in France, self-management received another breath of life. The rhetoric of revolution and class warfare was everywhere during the events, but against the strictures of institutions such as the French Communist Party and national labor unions, a decidedly anarcho-democratic tone pervaded. Labor was a central issue, and efforts to connect student radicals and workers in a united front were widespread, however fleeting their successes. The direct democratic spirit of ’68, however, pervaded relationships and issues beyond narrowly economic ones, and in 1968–72 what Alain Touraine dubbed the new social movements were born, injecting a hybrid vision of democracy and revolution into political campaigns for women, gays, immigrant workers, youth, farmers, soldiers, prisoners, psychiatric patients, and the environment.²⁶ Post-1968 French self-management thus combined the democratic presumption that the people best equipped to address social and political dilemmas are those directly affected by them with a revolu- tionary aspiration for a more global transformation of the social order. The atmosphere of the new social movements led in a num-ber of directions, some of them legal and reformist, others service oriented or personalizing. At the very moment when the energies of the post-1968 period began to wane, the ambitions of self- management produced a final and climactic experiment at Lip. Ironically, against the trend of the new social movements, the Lip factory strike of 1973 recentered the vision of autogestion on the field of experience out of which the tradition had first emerged, namely, work and labor.²⁷ [BOURG, 2013:567/568]

BIBLIOGRAFIA

ATACK, Margaret., May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 3–4 and passim). [Margaret Atack has emphasized with respect to May 1968 the role of repetition (including the repetition of earlier revolutionary forms) and the “hall of mirrors” quality of experience and representation Her subtle readings of a somewhat dis- parate cast of post-1968 films and books culminates in the argu- ment that May 1968 helped pry open the door on postmodernity.

#BOURG, Julian.,Nostalgia in Recent French Films on the ’68 Years | IN SHERMAN, Daniel J., Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder, e A. AneeshT., he long 1968 : revisions and new perspectives Indiana University Press, 2013

. see Ju- lian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 25–42. [ On the history of French interpretations of May 1968]

5. Alison Smith, French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2005), 33. [ Less interested in militant cinema per se, Smith makes the compelling case that many post-1968 French films grappled indirectly with the events even if they did not cite them explicitly.

Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriadis (Jean- Marc Coudray), Mai 1968: La brèche: Premières réflexions sur les événements, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1988; 1st ed., Paris: Fayard, 1968)

FILMOGRAFIA

Les amants réguliers, directed by Philippe Garrel, 178 mins. (Maïa Films, 2005);

Lip: L’imagination au pouvoir, directed by Chris- tian Rouaud, 118 mins. (Les films d’ici, 2007), Lip film website, http://liplefilm.com.

ECOS DE MEIA OITO NO CINEMA

: MOURIR A TRENTE ANS (Romain Goupil, 1980)

Written by Ihering Guedes Alcoforado