cahiers\1

Chris Marker, Mario Marret & SLON, bientt jespre (1967-1968)

Notes on Militant Cinema

(1967-1977)
Start from zero
For a brief moment, the world was on fire. Impossible to say how and when
the spark was lit, but we know the air had been thick with tense anticipation for
quite some time, and it wasnt long before the flames were crackling all over. What
was felt during the long 1968 did not, as many still seem to imagine, erupt as a
momentary and localized flash of lightningin a serene sky, but flared up at the
convergence point of multiple smouldering hot spots and flaming areas, dispersed
in space, evolving over time. The fires were spreading at a moment when struggles against Western colonialism and neo-colonialismgripped the entire Third
World: at the same time the Vietnam war was increasingly polarizing the world
stage, guerrilla groups such as Uruguays Tupamaros and Chiles Movimiento de
Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) were sprouting throughout Latin America, independence movements were gaining ground in Portugals African empire, the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) had brought together various forces struggling
against Israeli colonialism, and left-wing rebellion was proliferating in various Asian
countries, from India and Nepal to Malaysia and the Philippines. Che Guevaras
1967 call to create two, three, many Vietnams was taken to heart by resistance
movements all over the world, while propositions to construct new societal forms in
Cuba and China seemed to offer fresh, grassroots-based models of socialism.
Meanwhile, in France and Italy, a wave of strikes and occupations took hold
of factories and universities, coming to a head in the events of May 1968 and the
hot autumn of 1969. In the US, the large-scale civil rights protests that had been
gathering steam since the mid-1950s boiled over when the surge of demonstrations
against institutional racism and the Vietnam War led to violent uprisings, escalating
in the 1968 Chicago riots. The clashes with police and army troops painfully resonated with another event that had happened just a few days earlier, when Russian
tanks brought winter to the Prague Spring, brutally crushing the dream of a socialism with a human face. From Brazil to Japan, from Northern Ireland to South Africa:
everywhere, the sky was filled with smoke and ashes. As if there were nothing to
be seen but the light of the flames. But behind the haze, there was still a lurking
sense of horizon, connecting local and specific struggles to a broader narrative,
seemingly bound together by resistance against class oppression and imperialism,
holding the promise of another world.
Where was cinema, this great art of light and shadow, in all this turmoil? As
oppositional leftist politics seeped deeper into all areas of cultural life, filmmakers were increasingly confronted with questions such as: How to contribute to the

struggle? How can cinema make itself useful? For filmmakers of all leanings, wrote
French critic Serge Daney, in this near-open battle, in their very craft of film-making,
a single problem emerges: How can political statements be presented cinematically? How can they be made positive?1 The radical cinema that flourished so brightly
in those years, on the wings of the various, adventurous new waves that had
infused the cinematic landscape with a playful spirit of liberation and iconoclasm,
was one that saw itself as part of a broader project of national and international
socio-political transformation. Its ambition was no longer solely to free up the
camera and rewrite the codes of representation, but to make itself into a powerful
vehicle for this transformation, by all means necessary. As worldwide revolts gave
more and more currency to the idea of revolution, filmmakers were compelled to
revolutionize their own means of production, expression and exhibition. When Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha was working on his fabulous opera-mitrailleuse,
Terra em Transe (1967), he wrote:

When film-makers organize themselves to start from zero, to create a cinema

with new types of plot lines, of performance of rhythm, and with a different poetry,
they throw themselves into the dangerous, revolutionary adventure of learning
while you produce, of playing theory and practice side by side, of reformulating
every theory through every practice, of conducting themselves according to the apt
dictum coined by Nelson Pereira Dos Santos from some Portuguese poet: I dont
know where Im going, but I know Im not going over there. 2

To start from zero, recharging with every film: for Rocha and many other
filmmakers in Latin America and elsewhere, it was not merely enough to dress
up political subjects and messages in traditional outfits, as so many colleagues
inclined to do at the time. It was hardly enough to proudly raise the red flag and
use revolutionary theory as a signpost of good will and sentiment, as Sergio Leone
did in Gi la testa, opening with Maos statement: The Revolution is not a dinner
party... . No, these ideas had to be thoroughly explored and followed through within cinema, which meant that the fundamental aesthetic, economic and ideological
conditions and conventions of cinema had to be rethought anew. What could a
cinema be if it were free from the overpowering influence of what Jean-Luc Godard
referred to as the devious pair of Hollywood/Mosfilm? How could cinema be
liberated from the clutches of what Guy Debord and his Situationist posse, in 1967,
called the immense accumulationof spectacles, keeping the spectator at bay in a
state of passive contemplation, separated from life itself?
This challenge was not entirely new. Debates on cinema as a possible form of
political intervention had been raging ever since the rise of Soviet Cinema in the
aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin commented that cinema was
the most important art form and had resurged at various times, not in the least
at the pinnacle of the Internationalist Popular Front alliance, when filmmakers such

1. Serge Daney, Fonction critique, Cahiers du cinma 250, May 1974

2. Glauber Rocha, Beginning at Zero: Notes on Cinema and Society, The DramaReview,
Winter 1970

as Jean Renoir and Joris Ivens were swept up in their enthusiasm for communist
ideals and the fight against fascism, and after World War II, in the context of the
reconstruction of Italy and the revolution in Cuba. The heavy political stakes that
were manifest in the 1960s put some of the debates that had been simmering
within Marxist thought for decades back on the agenda, leading to radical, if often
erratic re-readings of the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Bertold Brecht
and Walter Benjamin. Only now it was done in the light of the neo-Marxist and
libertarian thinking that marked the time, from the pamphlets of Mao Zedong and
Che Guevara, the anti-colonialist writings of Frantz Fanon and Aim Csaire to the
structuralist work of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser. Once again, the fundamental tensions between art and world, appearance and reality, practice and theory,
were subject to intense inquiry, centred around the idea of militant cinema.

Amongst the people

But the notion of militant cinema, always at the service of the people, actually
indicated a divided landscape. There are two kinds of militant films, argued
Jean-Luc Godard in 1970, those we call blackboard films and those known as
Internationale films. The latter are the equivalent of chanting Linternationale during
a demonstration, while the others prove certain theories that allow one to apply to
reality what he has seen on screen.3 This division essentially redoubled a debate
that had already been initiated in 1920s Soviet Union, between those who considered the primary concern of revolutionary art as being the search for new formal
and theoretical models and those who saw it as first and foremost a question of
effective communication in a form and language that was already understood by
the common people. In the 1960s, the latter tendency was exemplified by the proliferation of a popular model of militant cinema, according to which the camera
had to place itself in the heart of the struggle, where the filmmakers task consisted
of capturing the shimmering traces of life as vividly and authentically as possible,
plucking the living reality like the flowers that Mao encouraged to bloom. In a way,
this notion of militant cinema was already apparent in the work of internationalist
cin-travellers such as Ren Vautier and Yann Le Masson: cameras were taken to
the battlefields and the barricades, to occupied universities and factories on strike,
not only to testify to the events, but also to give voice to those who had remained
voiceless for so long.
This task was taken up by militants and filmmakers worldwide. In Japan, the
students of Zengakuren, with the help of documentarists such as ShinsukeOgawa, started to use cameras to document their battles with the authorities; In Italy,
Cesare Zavattini, one of the proponents of the Neorealist movement, successfully
promulgated the idea of Cinegiornale liberi; in the US, the October 1967Pentagonriot led to the establishment of a broad network of Newsreel collectives;
in the Middle East, the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) dedicated itself to recording the
Arab-Israeli conflict, under the motto, gun in one hand, camera in the other; and

3. Godard par Godard, ditions de lEtoile - Cahiers du cinma, Paris, 1985, p.348

during the May events in France, hundreds of film technicians and filmmakers
joined forces in the tats Gnraux du Cinma and started to produce Cin-tracts.
This series of anonymous shorts (some made with the help of established filmmakers) was instigated by Chris Marker, who had previously also set up SLON (La
Societ de Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles). It was under the auspices of this
collective that Marker put together Far from Vietnam (1967), a portmanteau film
made as a protest against the American military intervention in Vietnam, including
contributions by Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens, Agns Varda
and William Klein. How to make a useful film?, asked Klein, Fiction, agit-prop,
documentary, what? We were never able to decide, but we had to do something.
At the time, Far from Vietnam came about not only as a vibrant expression of the
solidarity that many tiermondistes in Western Europe and the US felt for the national liberation struggles that were raging all over the world, but it also opened up
the question of usefulness, a concern that has always been central to the debates
on art and politics: how does one close the gaps between here and there,
between those who take images, those whose images are taken and those who
watch them? How does one translate the struggle without re-inscribing the relations
of domination between those who have the power to represent and those who are
merely represented? And in doing so, how does one create art that can reach the
broad masses, not only adopting, but also enriching their own forms of expression?

In his contribution to the collective film (a segment with the Vertov-inspired

title Camera-eye), Godard explicitly took up these questions. I am cut off from
the working class, but my struggle against Hollywood is related. Yet workers dont
come to see my films. Perhaps engaging in the worldwide resistance against
imperialism and colonialism, and creating a Vietnam in each of us, suggested Godard, can make us aware of what is common to both the filmmakers and the workers struggle. What can bind us, the workers of Rhodiacta and me, is Vietnam.
Godard had actually visited the Rhodiacta factory in Besanon just after March
1967, when the first occupations in France since 1936 had taken place, and would
later also be there for the premiere of Far From Vietnam. On those occasions, he
was always in the company of Chris Marker, who, during the production of the film,
had been invited by the organizers of the local cultural programme to come and
take a look. To Marker, who had previously been working in China, Cuba, Israel,
and Siberia, they made a plea to give some attention to local matters: If you arent
in China or elsewhere, come to Rhodia. Important things are happening.
After a first visit, Marker decided to make a film about the strike and secretly
started shooting footage in the factory, interviewing workers, trying to involve them
directly in the production of the film. The initial result of this effort was bientt
jespre, created by Marker, filmmaker Mario Marret and the SLON team. The film
not only provides an account of the strikers concerns about working conditions, but
also shows how they attempted to escape from their imposed identity, by laying
claim to experiences deemed inaccessible and inappropriate to them: culture,
education, communication. However, when the film was first shown to the strikers,
they expressed a certain dissatisfaction toward it, finding it altogether too bleak,
because it lacked perspective, and too romantic because it showed militants and

strikes, while skipping over the preparation for the strikes and the training of the
militants, which were considered the most important aspects of militant activism in
factories. One of the workers, Pol Cbe, told Marker:

Maybe you believe that audiovisual language, like written language, requires
years of study, but we are convinced that this is not the case We have so many
things to say and we have a new way to say it, a new medium, a new weapon. 4
Responding to the criticism, Marker replied that the cinematic representation
and expression of the working class should indeed be taken up by the workers
themselves, from the inside of the struggle, not by well-meaning explorers coming
from the outside. The only way to represent the people without relying on the
hallowed forms and customs that keep them in their place, so it seemed, was to
provide them with their own means of representation. This would be the starting
point for a longstanding collaborative effort between filmmakers and workers
dedicated to fostering a cinma ouvrier. They named themselves the Medvedkin
Group, after the Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin, who in 1932 had travelled
around the Soviet Union in a specially equipped cin-train. Starting with Classe de
lutte (1968), the collective initiated a model of filmmaking that aimed to annul the
division between expert and amateur, producer and consumer, a model that would
last in Besanon for almost five years before spreading to other places in France
and beyond. The aim was no longer to simply produce militant films about the
workers conditions, but a militant workers film, expressing, as Marker commented,
a change of consciousness, incited by a desire to learn how to see.

Learning to see
For others, however, the challenge was not to make films about the process
of learning how to see, but to make this process itself inherent to the production
and reception of films. It is not enough to do what Chris Marker did at Rhodiaceta
what The New York Times and Le Monde call information. We must rise above
sensible knowledge and fight to make it rational knowledge It implies a concrete
analysis of a concrete situation. This quote, ripe with Marxist axioms, is taken from
Pravda (1970), one of the films that Godard made with Jean-Pierre Gorin as the
Dziga Vertov Group, undoubtedly the best-known proponent of the so-called blackboard films. For these filmmakers, it did not suffice to start from zero and explore
new sensible forms for new content: it was necessary to return to zero,5 to go back
to the blackboard and start learning all over again, to rediscover the meaning of
the simplest acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading. This radical-regressive tendency took flight in France, where filmmakers and critics were looking
for new tools of inspiration in the theoretical raids that had been traversing the

4. Trevor Stark, Cinema in the Handsofthe People: Chris Marker,the Medvedkin Group,
andthe Potential of Militant Film, October 139, Winter 2012
5. Quoted in Le Gai Savoir (1969)

discursive landscape since the beginning of the decade, particularly in the guise
of Althusserianism, which in its desire to re-found Marxism, brought together fairly
heterogeneous theories drawn from psychoanalysis and semiology under the
concept of Structuralism. The most elaborate application of the structural thinking
in the field of cinema emerged on the pages of such magazines as Cinthique
and Cahiers du Cinma which, triggered by the work of the Tel Quel group, started
to cultivate a lively debate on problems of ideological criticism and a potentially
revolutionary theoretical practice in cinema. After 1968, critical thinking in film
increasingly found itself in the throes of a mode of reading associated with what
Louis Althusser called symptomatic: a reading that searches for meaning under
the surface of things, lifting the veil of images to reveal the constitutive presuppositions that make them possible in the first place, the underlying logic that determines what can and cannot be seen and thought within its framework.

The key word in this period was ideology, which was considered not simply a
lie made up to fool the ignorant, or the inverted reflection of real social relations
(as in Marxs Camera Obscura model), but as a system of representation with its
own logic and materiality: a set of images, myths, ideas and concepts that defined
how the world was supposed to be experienced or negotiated. The reality put
forward through ideology is not the system of the real relations that govern how
we live, but our imaginary relationship to the real relations in which we live. What
is generally taken for visible self-evidence should in fact be read as a form of
encoding, whereby a society or authority legitimates itself by naturalizing itself, by
rooting itself in the obviousness of the visible. According to this logic, all films had
to be considered political, because they were always already overdetermined
as expressions of the prevailing ideology, merely reproducing the world as it is
experienced when filtered through this ideology. In view of a reality which was
considered already coded, the challenge for any filmmaker was to break with
reproduction or naturalization of reality, to uncover the unconscious mise-en-scne
that precedes any cinematic mise-en-scne. As Serge Daney wrote, Realism must
always be overcome. Truth was put on the side of the signifier, while the signified
was put on the side of ideology, or in Lacanian terms, on the side of the imaginary.
Everything that involved a direct relationship between the sign and a referential
reality, image and appearance, was suspected of being ideological, conforming to
the self-evidence of the given. The only possible counter-strategy consisted in creating an awareness of the gaps between referent and sign, between what the image
represents and how it represents it. It was this idea of disjunction, this breaking up
and questioning the apparent unity of cinema by way of a radical separation of
elements (Brecht), that was at the heart of Godards aim to produce films politically. Political struggles should not merely be made into an object: film itself should
be made into an object of struggle and criticism.
Godard did not simply want to create or represent an alternative worldview,
but to investigate and deconstruct the whole process of signification out of which
worldviews are constructed. Starting with La Chinoise (1967), the Althusserian pedagogy of seeing, listening, speaking, reading became the basic rule in his play-

Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise (1967)

book, the fundament of his so-called blackboard films. La Chinoise is a depiction

of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola who placed cultural concerns at the centre
of their revolt in an attempt to rescue everyday life from the clutches of the hidden
persuaders which had colonized it. But Marxism not only functions as the subject
of representation, it is also the principle of representation. While the Marxism
represented here is Chinese Maoism as it figured in the Western imagination at the
time symbolized by the two Red books, Maos Little Red Bookand thestudent-run
Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes the films mise-en-scene is constructed according to
the basic ideas underlying Althusserianism.6 The rhetoric and stereotypes of Maoism
and Marxism are here merely used as a catalogue of images and a repertoire of
phrases from which Godard, as always, had sampled various quotes, symbols and
objects, setting them up as part of an extensive classroom exercise. Indeed, this is
a film in the making, about learning how to see, listen, speak and read the leftist
discourses that were pervading Parisian cultural life, at a time when the Cultural
Revolution in China served as a projection screen for the hopes and dreams of the
radical left, as an exit route to escape the straightjacket of orthodox Marxism. It is
also a lesson on how to see and listen with them, as if they were but a set of illustrations and formulas written on a big blackboard. The scenographic setting becomes
a classroom, the dialogue a recitation, the voice-over a lecture, the shooting an
object lesson, the film-maker a schoolmaster: always the logic of school.

10

This pedagogic principle is the basis for Godards militant films: only the
application of a Marxist analysis of image and sound was able to bring light to all
those roaming in the dark. And there could be no semiology without semioclasm:
the unified appearance of the audiovisual had to be broken up, the correspondences between sounds, words and images undone, so that they could speak for
and against themselves. In Godards films, there is hardly any attempt to point
out the origins of the sampled elements. There is not even an attempt to question
discourses by others, such as Althussers Ideology and Ideological State Apparatusesin Lotte in Italia (1971), or Brechts lesson on the role of intellectuals in the
revolution inTout va bien (1972). It is merely a matter of looking for other elements
to put them to the test, rearranging their connections and reframing their meaning.
The urgency of learning anew in order to put a halt to the endless circulation of
images, to look underneath the surface of images, to read between the lines: this
was the inclination that was feverishly developing among the French cinephiles of
that time the post-nouvelle vague moment of structuralism and the golden age of
semiology. Political commitment in cinema once again appeared as commitment
to form, rather than to revolutionary content. Against the old assumption that there
is no responsibility of forms, there could no longer be a representation of politics
without critically reflecting on the politics of representation.

6. See Jacques Rancires analysis: Le rouge de la Chinoise, Trafic 18, spring 1996

Beyond the surface

In reference to Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, Godard would say,
Thedominant class creates a worldafter its own image, but it also creates an
image of its world, which it calls a reflection of reality.7 With the idea that the reflection of reality should be considered an ideological construction, a longstanding
debate was once again brought to the fore: the debate on realism. For those who
were trying to develop a film critical thinking in a Marxist framework, Andr Bazins
longstanding legacy of ontological realism was no longer of any use. Everything
that constituted that paradigm the notions of continuity and transparency, the
epiphany of the sensible real had to be violently renounced. As Godard had
already indicated in the scenario ofLes Carabiniers(1963), it is not enough to
say how things are real: one has to say how things really are. It was this adage,
adapted from Bertold Brecht, that was at the heart of the impulse to decipher the
world, the desire to look behind the appearance of things. It was Brecht who, back
in the 1930s, had stated:

Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality.
A photograph of the Krupp works or the A.E.G. tells us next to nothing about these
institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human
relations the factory, say means that they are no longer explicit. So something
must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed.8
Brechts ideas on realism as the exposure of a societys causal network and
dominant order had already been used as a reference in the film criticism of the
1940s and 50s, even mediated by the work of Joseph Losey in the Cahiers du
Cinma. Throughout the first half of the 1960s, however, another interpretation of
Brechts ideas would hold sway, one less concerned with film as an art of perception than film as a system of signification. The main inspiration from this turn came
from Althusser and Roland Barthes, who treated Brechts views as a counterpoint
for the primacy of psychology and identification in art, which was considered part
and parcel of the bourgeois worldview. It had never been Brechts intention to
condemn the lies displayed by art, but rather to call attention to the ways in which
art can demonstrate to spectators the workings of a society that lies beyond them,
and invite them to take part in its transformation. What is stigmatized is the illusion,
which tends to present reality as a natural and unproblematic given and which
keeps the spectators in a state of passivity, hanging up their brains with their hats
in the cloakroom. An active spectator should refuse identification and remain at a
distance, to be able to assess the causes and remedies for the injustices suffered.
The mirror of transparent myths in which a society can recognise itself first has to
be broken, before it can really learn to know and change itself. In Mythologies
(1957), Barthes uses Brechts critique of mystification and identification to point
out the shortcomings in Eli Kazans On the Waterfront, especially in its final scenes

7. Godard quoted in James Roy McBean, See You at Mao: Godards Revolutionary British
Sounds,Film Quarterly, 1970-71, pp15-23
8. Bertold Brecht, quoted by Walter Benjamin (1931)

11

Jean-Marie Straub & Danile Huillet, Othon (1970)

12

when, after having exposed the violence and the corruption of the workers union,
Marlon Brandos character decides to go back to work and give himself over to the
exploitative system. Barthes wrote:

If there ever was one, here is a case where we should apply the method of
demystication that Brecht proposes and examine the consequences of our identication with the lms leading character... It is the participatory nature of this scene
which objectively makes it an episode of mystication... Now it is precisely against
the danger of such mechanisms that Brecht proposed his method of alienation.
Brecht would have asked Brando to show his navet, to make us understand that,
despite the sympathy we may have for his misfortunes, it is even more important to
perceive their causes and their remedies.9
Similarly, in Brechts famous Mother Courage, what is shown in the play is not
so much the suffering of a mother figure, but the result of a failure to come to grips
with her historical situation. As spectators, we participate in her blindness at the
same time as we are made aware of it. As Barthes once observed (in reference to
Charlie Chaplins films), to see someone else not seeing is the best way to intensely see what he or she does not see. Staging events in such a way that what had
seemed natural and immutable is revealed as historical and thus changeable: this
is what Brecht called the Verfremdungseffekt. As a derivative of the Marxist theory
of alienation, the formalist notion of oestranenie and the surrealist practice of
errance, this strategy consists of turning the object of which one is made aware, to

9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, pp. 6869

which ones attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar and immediately accessible into something peculiar, striking and unexpected. In essence, it
is an effect of displacement, the establishment of a gap between what is on show
and how it is experienced and interpreted or in semiotic terms, between signified
and signifier in order to demystify its apparent inevitability and appropriateness
and draw attention to its own artice, rather than attempting to conceal it. It is an
idea that runs through Godards films of the 1960s and early 70s, as well as films
by Harun Farocki (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969), NagisaOshima (Death By Hanging,
1968) and Jean-Marie Straub & Danile Huillet, to name a few.
The work of Straub & Huillet is particularly affiliated with Barthess interpretation of the verfremdungseffect, according to which actors should speak their lines
as verse instead of attempting to make formal and ordered language appear
as the natural expression of psychological states. Barthes cites with approval
Brechts idea that the actor should speak his or her part not as if he were living or
improvising it, but like a quotation. It is this principle of embodied storytelling, of
acting out, that Straub & Huillet have always applied to their films. The title of their
first film, Nicht vershnt (1965), can be read as a Brechtian axiom par excellence:
existing divisions and contradictions are not to be reconciled - on the contrary, they
should be exposed and accentuated. Inspired by Brecht, Barthes wrote that class
division has its inevitable counterpart in a division of meanings, and class struggle
has its equally inevitable counterpart in a division of a war of meanings: as long as
there is class struggle (national or international), the division of the axiomatic field
will be inexpiable. 10
This war of meanings is what was at stake in the pedagogical space of the
blackboard cinema of the 1968 generation. As discourse is always a space of
conflict and a form of violence, it has to be unveiled and disclosed as dialectical
contradiction, acted out in the form of sheer non-reconciliation for in contradiction
lies the hope. For Straub & Huillet, dialectics meant dividing one into two, rather
than combining two into one. This is apparent in the mise-enscne, in which there
is always a collision between what is seen and what is heard, between past and
present (what Straub called a science-fiction effect), between words taken from
existing literary texts, how those words resonate and those who say them. In Othon
(1969), for example, PierreCorneilles eponymous text is recited on Mount Palatine,
among the ruins of ancient Rome, in full view of the contemporary cityscape of the
Italian capital, by a predominantly Italian cast, dressed in traditional togas. In this
way, the film sets up a system of gaps and displacements, transgressing numerous
historical, geographical and linguistic boundaries in order to unfold a genealogical
trajectory of European power structures, from the modern city of Rome, to France in
the era of the Grand Sicle, to the ancient Roman Empire. To the 1968 generation,
the Straubs suggested that the question of power and class relations was a lot
older than imagined. Didnt the first sentence in the Communist Manifesto already
state that The history of mankind is the history of class struggle.?

10. RolandBarthes, Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers, 1971

13

When Othon was released in France, it was heavily criticized in certain leftist
circles as an abject film, not only because of the unusual setting and diction (the
worst recitation in a school context, wrote a critic), but mainly because of its
incapacity to adapt and enlighten a historical text for spectators in the present,
instead translating it into an incomprehensible film in which no political message
could be found. The response of the Cahiers critics was that films such as Othon,
as well as Sotto il segno dello Scorpione by the Taviano brothers, Yoshishige
Yoshidas Eros + Massacre, or Robert Kramers Ice films that had been vigorously
defended on the pages of Cahiers were to be considered political precisely
because they were not satisfied with the pure and simple delivery of a straightforward political message. Rather, they start at the beginning (which is also one of
the conditions of political analysis) and carry out on their very materiality that
of the signifiers they put into play, as well as that of the conditions and means of
production of these signifiers a scriptural work which, as such, constitutes political
work.11 In other words, political cinema has to start from its own materiality,
examine its own means and conditions of existence, and reveal rather than hide
the work which has gone into its making, as well as its production of meaning. Only
by refusing the effects of recognition and transparency, by criticizing the illusions of
consciousness and unravelling its real material conditions and contradictions, can
cinema activate the spectator, prompting him to start where the film ends, completing what it has left unfinished.

14

Politicsof representation
Can a revolutionary film be made without criticizing the dominant forms of
representation? This question, at the core of the many debates on militant cinema,
became explicit in the discussion over two French films released in 1972: the Dziga
Vertov Groups Tout va Bien and Marin Karmitz Coup pour Coup. The similarity
between the two films is striking. Both proposed an account of the class struggle
which was stirring in France four years after 1968, complete with factory occupation and sequestration, but in contrast to the various direct documentations of
particular uprisings and strikes, the filmmakers chose fictional forms with which
to depict the workers revolt. Additionally, the filmmakers, who shared similar
political sympathies which leaned towards Marxist-Leninism, chose to produce and
distribute the films through conventional channels rather than the various parallel
circuits that had been set up in previous years. So the difference between the two
films could not be found in the choice of subject or diffusion, but in their formal
approach. What characterized Coup pour Coup was an adherence to what Althusserians referred to as a spontaneous ideology. Karmitz chose to ask real workers
to act out their actual life in a natural way, and filmed them in a dispositive that
put the spectator in the heat of the struggle, directly amongst the people. At last,

11. Jean-Louis Comolli, Film/politique (2) LAveu: 13 propositions, Cahiers du Cinma 224, October 1970

commented advocates of the film, a voice was given to the people. For once, the
working class was shown in their own environment, which is to say in the place
of production, exploitation and repression. For once, by reflecting the concrete
manifestations of the proletarian class, a film actually provided sensible knowledge of capitalist social relations. As an enthusiast wrote, Confidence was given
to the experience and the naturalness of the workers, and that paid off well: life is
revealed in all its truth and intensity.
According to the critics of the film, however, the idea that there was an actual
truth to capture and communicate through images and sounds completely ignored
the fact that truth is not inherent in things, but alludes to a relationship of conformity
between an object and its knowledge, between a reality and its reflection. As this
relationship is always part of an ideological process, it does not suffice to produce
sensible knowledge of capitalist social relations and proletarian class struggles. It
is necessary to go beyond that and create rational knowledge of the internal laws
of this process. These critics challenged the assumption that a redoubling of reality
gives way to an active reflection of that reality: it is not because the reflection of
reality on the screen is antagonistic to the dominant vision that they have revolutionary value. Making a film from the point of view of the working class should not
be confounded with giving voice to the workers. It can never be an end in itself.
To leave things at the level of appearances, of the sensible, only affirms the cult
of spontaneity and leaves the dominant ideology unchallenged. Furthermore, as
Daney suggested, naturalising also implies a denial and an effacement of the
dialectics of exclusion that lie at the heart of the dominant order.

Naturalism is the game of readjustment where those such as young people,

immigrants and peasants who were previously forbidden from making films and
were never seen on the screen are now suddenly included in fiction films as though
they had always been part of them. They are naturalized in every sense of the
word, recognized by the law, made normal, natural and legal, and accede to a
sort of iconic dignity. but what is glossed over in this process ... is how and why
they break into the story.12
Naturalism always the bte noire of the Cahiers at the time - is thus seen
as a point of view and a way of filming that renders natural what is in fact not.
According to the same critics, this tendency towards naturalism in Coup pour Coup
is confirmed by Karmitz typecasting decision to give the roles of the other characters the bosses and the union delegates to professional actors, conforming
to the idea of everyone in his or her place, in harmony with their nature, with the
way people are. Class struggle is neither represented nor suppressed, it is simply
taxonomlzed. Karmitz essentially reasserts a capitalist division of work, founded
on a simplified analysis of class struggle based on relations of repression and
resistance. As he himself explained, The form of the film is conditioned by the

12. Serge Daney, Pascal Kane, Jean-Pierre Oudart, Serge Toubiana, Une certaine tendance du
cinema franc;ais, Cahiers du Cinema 257, May-June 1975.

15

contrast between repression and resistance. Everything is based on that. Godard

and Gorin, on the other hand, opposed this mise-en-scene of workers playing their
natural roles by working with professional actors:

The militants who distrust actors ask workers to play their proper role. Traditional cinema takes big stars and makes them play the roles of proletarians. We think
that, in the present situation, a worker who plays like Jean Gabin cannot embody
his condition but only recount himself. So we have taken actors to play the roles
of workers, but downtrodden and exploited actors, who feel the class struggle in
their stomach. That has permitted us, by putting them in a correct situation, to really
oppose them to the actors representing the chieftains. 13

16

This choice was rooted in a desire to highlight the contradictions between

the status of actors and the social roles that fiction traditionally assigns to them.
Casting the well-known French actor Yves Montand, for example, was not based on
his natural tendency towards repression, but because of the dominant idea that
actors should stick to their characters. It is precisely because Montand is perfectly
able to embody a worker with a flair for spontaneity that they did not ask him
to do so. For Godard and Gorin, one cannot transform actors into workers and
workers into actors without asking what has to be transformed. Before representing
classes, one has to reflect on the ideological conception of that representation,
because there is already a dominant idea on how to depict class models, in their
way of being, moving and talking. Exploring the theme of class struggle to destroy
this idea does not hold up. Rather, the struggle itself has to traverse the work on
the film; it has to be extended through cinema.
The point of Tout va bien, whose mise-en-scene is clearly inspired by Brechts
lehrstcke (an attentive critic called the film the Sesame Street of political radicalism), is to take up the contradictions that are left unspoken in Coup pour Coup
between the practice of cinema and the practice of politics, between the status of
workers and the status of actors in order to make them productive. This is also
why Karmitz was criticized for not using the recordings of the discussions between
members of the film crew and the actors before and during the shooting: instead of
developing an active reflection of the working process, he chose to give the film a
sense of authenticity, covering up what is at stake in the contradiction between politics and cinema. Both Tout va Bien and Coup pour Coup essentially started from
the same assumption: that one has to know the world, reveal the reality under the
surface of things, in order to be able to transform it. While the first chose to create
a reflection of reality, the second chose to expose the reality of reflection. While
the first chose to revive a specific struggle and reproduce a sensible perception
under the watchful eye of the camera, the second chose to put to work a rational
reflection on the internal laws of the struggle. Why else has Marxist thought broken
with the notion of contemplation? A film too, it was said, should intervene.

13. Jean-Luc Godard in Nouvel Observateur 388, April 1972

Behind the firing lines

In Vent dEst, another film by the Dziga Vertov Group, there is a sequence
in which Glauber Rocha stands at a dusty crossroads, with arms outstretched.
A young woman with a movie camera goes up to him and says, Excuse me for
interrupting your class struggle, but could you please show me the way towards
political cinema? Rocha points in front of him, then behind and to his left and says,
That way is the cinema of aesthetic adventure and philosophical inquiry, while
this way is Third World cinema a dangerous cinema, divine and marvellous,
where the questions are practical ones... Rocha puts forward what was felt to
be the main difference between the European counter-cinema and the so-called
Third World cinema - which is in itself anything but a stable phenomenon. While,
for European filmmakers, it seemed in the first place to be a matter of radically
opposing, or even, as Godard mentioned to Rocha, destroying the industrially and
ideologically dominant cinema, for many filmmakers in the Third World, it was not
a matter of destruction, but of invention, as a way to escape the stranglehold of
(neo)colonization, repression, censorship and underdevelopment. Although Rocha,
one of the pioneering filmmakers of the Brazilian Cinema Novomovement, always
expressed a strong admiration for Godard, he was also aware of the deep gap
between them:

Godard sums up all the questions of todays European intellectuals: is making

art worthwhile? The question is an old one And that is what is so annoying in
Europe today: the issue of the usefulness of art is old, but it is in fashion, and, in
cinema, it is up to Godard alone to come to grips with the crisis. Godard is what
Solanas is to us in Buenos Aires. The truth, however, whether our intellectual fellow-countrymen want to hear it or not, is that European and American cinema has
gone up a road without hope, and it is only in the Third World countries that there
is a way left to make cinema.14
For Godard, Rocha laconically notes, cinema was over and done with. For
filmmakers in the Third World, it was just beginning: Godard & Co. are above zero.
We are below zero. Some of the most prolific explorers of these new beginnings
could undoubtedly be found in Latin America, where filmmakers offered arguments for a cine de liberacion, for cine imperfecto, for an aesthetic of hunger,
a third or triccontinental cinema of decolonization all terms that have since
framed many debates on political cinema and have become part of the rhetoric
of resistance against imperialist oppression, and for the empowerment of the
people in the Third World. All these filmmakers were grappling with the rise of
nationalism and militancy in the aftermath of several political and social incidents
that had erupted throughout the continent, from the unfinished workers revolution
in Bolivia in 1952 to the military overthrow of Argentinas President Pern in 1955,
and, most significantly, the guerrilla war in Cuba, which led to the establishment
of a socialist regime in 1959. It was not only the Cinema novo filmmakers, but also

14. Rocha, O ltimo escndalo de Godard, Manchete 928, 31 January 1970

17

Jorge Sanjins and the Ukamau group in Bolivia, Julio Garca Espinosa and Toms
Gutierrez Alea in Cuba, Miguel Littn, Ral Ruz and Patricio Guzmn in Chile, and
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in Argentina: they all expressed the need
for thinking about cinema as a social instrument, as a weapon in the struggle for
national liberation and cultural transformation with an idea in ones head and a
camera in ones hand.
We must discuss, we must invent... It was this quote by Frantz Fanon that
opened the manifesto Toward a Third Cinema (1969), written by Solanas and
Getino, who in the same year also released La Hora de los Hornos (Hour of the
Furnaces), a didactic film fresco produced clandestinely under the Pron regime
and signed by the Cine Liberacin Group. In the manifesto, arguably the most influential articulation of Third World cinema, Solanas and Getino follow Fanons lead
and argue that cinema should be placed first at the service of life itself, ahead
of art; dissolve aesthetics in the life of society. Its objective was nothing short of a
decolonization of the mind. In line with the thinking of the Russian avant-gardes of
the 1920s, and Eisenstein in particular, according to whom films had toploughthe
mind of the viewer, cinema not only had to contribute to the development of a
new radical consciousness, but should also be instrumental in the revolutionary
transformation of society, as a means to an end. According to Rocha, however,
revolutionary cinema should be seen as more than a simple instrument that could
supposedly push spectators into the path of political consciousness and action:

18

The artist must demand a precise identification of what revolutionary art at

the service of political activism actually is, of what revolutionary art thrown into the
spaces opened up to new discussions is, and of what revolutionary art by the left
and operated by the right is. As an example of the first case, I, as a man of film,
cite La hora de los hornos, a film by the Argentine Fernando Solanas. It is typical
of the pamphlets of information, agitation and controversy that are currently being
used by political activists around the world. 15
To illustrate the second case, Rocha suggested his own films, which are not
composed as theoretical guides for action, but rather as attempts to break with
what he saw as bourgeois rationalism and the colonial logics of representation,
induced as they were by exotic primitivism and social miserabilism. Rocha claimed
that the work of Godard and Solanas, which basically consists of opposing an oppressive logic with a revolutionary one, does not allow for a way out of the deadlocks imposed by imperialism and capitalism. For him, revolution could only be
accomplished as a form of anti-reason and irrationalism: Revolutionary art must be
magic, capable of bewitching man to such a degree that he can no longer stand
to live in this absurd reality. The hopelessness of reality could only be overcome
through enchantment; freedom could only be devised through popular mysticism (in
favor of ideological demystification), something he saw arising from the historical
relationship between religion, folklore and rebellion. This interest in breaking the

15. Glauber Rocha, Aesthetic of Dream, presented at Columbia University in 1971

Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino & Grupo Cine Liberacin, La hora de los hornos (1968)

course of history and advocating some kind of return to the past not unlike Walter
Benjamins tigers leap into the past was not only something that Rocha shared
with the Straubs (Rocha organized screenings of Othon in Brazil, while Straub
spoke highly ofRochasAntonio das Mortes, from 1969), but even more so with Pier
Paolo Pasolini, whose work is also characterized by a certain regression towards
religious themes and irrational impulses. There has always been a fraternal, yet
heated dialogue between the two filmmakers. Rocha criticized Pasolinis depiction
of the Third World, which he saw as merely an alibi for perversion. Pasolini accused Rocha of having succumbed, as had Godard & Straub, to the blackmail of a
certain leftist thinking which prescribed a radical subversion of representation and
a conscious frustration of the spectators expectations.
What is it that Godard, the Straubs and Rocha are supposed to have in common? According to Pasolini, through their boundless provocation and transgression
of cinematic codes, their unpopular films at the same time render themselves as
agent provocateurs, martyrs and victims: the search for freedom from repression
had led to a suicidal intoxication and didactic self-exclusion, veering violently
towards the negation of cinema. For Pasolini, who was a great admirer of Christian
Metz semiology of cinema, there was no doubt that an infraction of the codes is

20

Glauber Rocha, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964, poster)

a necessary condition for invention after all, the first step towards liberation is to
let go of certainties and open up to the unknown. But it also implies a refraction
of self-preservation, one that opens the way to self-destruction. When the codes
are too violently violated, when the front lines of transgression and invention are
crossed too far behind the firing line, there comes a point when the codes can be
recuperated for endless possibilities of modification and expansion, and any notion
of struggle ends up being neutralized. This is when the struggle is no longer fought
on the barricades, but on the other side, behind vacated enemy lines, at which
point the enemy has disappeared, because he is fighting elsewhere. What is
important, wrote Pasolini, is not the moment of the realization of invention, but the
moment of invention. Permanent invention, continual struggle.16

16. Pier Paolo Pasolini,The Unpopular Cinema, 1970.

The end of a beginning

Where lines crossed? Isnt that what happened when the new waves of the
1960s, in their insatiable thirst for freedom, got caught up in the well-intended
games of decoding and deconstruction, when the liberties attained led to an
endless search for signification, to a point where there was no more sense to give?
The new waves had established an adventurous cinematic space of transversals
and transgressions, where codes were cut loose from their moorings, images and
sounds were set free from their bondage, where drifting took the place of wondering and iconoclasm replaced scandal. Still, it was only a matter of time before the
freedom of representation would become a suspension of representation altogether, when the screen was turned into a blackboard, and the art of showing became
an act of endlessly revealing. Godards work is undoubtedly the best example
of this evolution: from the playful liberations of his first films to the Althusserian
experiments of La Chinoise and the critical didacticism of the Dziga Vertov Group.
In the end, critical cinema was turned on itself, taking refuge in its own negation.
hoping to survive through its death (Adorno). This impasse is what is at stake in Ici
et Ailleurs. The story is well known: in 1970, a year after Yasser Arafat was elected
leader of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Godard and Gorin were
invited to make a film in support of the Palestinian struggle. They were not the only
ones. Around the same time, other collectives and filmmakers, including Pacific
Newsreel, Groupe Cinma Vincennes, Francis Reusser, Jean-Pierre Olivier de
Sardan (delegate of the French Maoist party), and Masao Adachi& KjiWakamatsu (associated with the Japanese Red Army) also travelled to Palestinian camps in
Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank to record the realities of the struggle. Just a
year earlier, the Palestine Cinema Unit, founded under the aegis of three pioneers,
Hany Jawhariyya, Sulafa Jadallah and Mustapha Abu Ali, had made the first militant films against Israeli colonization.
The aim of Godard and Gorins film, initially entitledUntil Victory,was to
understand the thought and working methods of the Palestinian revolution. Before
travelling to Palestine, they had put together a storyboard that systematically
conceived the path towards revolution: the peoples will + the armed struggle =
peoples war + political work = the education of the people + peoples logic =
the protracted war, until victory. But just a few weeks after the filming, which took
place between March and August 1970, Black September happened: Jordans King
Hussein decided to wage war on the PLO, resulting in the massacre of thousands
of Palestinians. Confronted with the death of many of the films collaborators and
growing antagonism within the Arab population, Godard was forced to rethink
the concept of the project, a challenge that became even more daunting in light
of the events that took place during the1972 Summer OlympicsinMunich. It took
him over five years to find a configuration for the images and sounds they had
gathered, five years to come up with a response to the question of how to make
sense of the gaps between intention and reality, commitment and failure, then and
now, here and there.

21

22
Chris Marker, Le fond de lair est rouge (1977)

Godard, together with Anne-Marie Miville, did what he had always done:
take the question and put it at the heart of the film. The film turned into a moving
mournful reflection on the impossibility of a filmmaker to intervene in political struggles, and the difficulty of escaping the endless chains of images and sounds in
which we are all caught up. Godard bemoaned how self-proclaimed militant films,
despite good intentions, tend to put the sound too loud, always covering up the
sound of one voice with that of another, obscuring what really is there to see in the
images. As part of a vigorous auto-critique, the film exposes the cinematic trickeries
by which we just love to be fooled: how images always deceive us, how sounds
always hide something else, how we are to learn to read the signs. The desire to
put a halt to the circulation of sounds and images ends up being a lamentation
for the end of a certain belief in the power of cinema, accompanying the end of a
belief in any change whatsoever. The act of mourning the failure of the Palestinian
revolution becomes an allegory for the failure of all revolutions.

The end of the leftist era is also depicted in another film that came out around
the same time: John Douglas & Robert Kramers Milestones. The film portrays the
demise of the oppositional movements from the inside, something which both filmmakers, as former members of the Newsreel collective, had experienced first hand.
At the end of the 1960s, both had worked on various films denouncing American
imperialism, including Peoples War, which aimed to give a view on the Vietnam
war from the perspective of partisans in North Vietnam. Kramer had already made
a trilogy of films In the Country (1966), The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969) which
explored the limits of a collective desire for revolution and armed struggle. Milestones was an attempt to grasp what had happened to these militant desires once
those limits had been reached, and they were redirected towards the exploration
of new communal forms. As Kramer said:

A lot of people say that the 70s are like a time of falling away from political
militancy. There is a sense in which that is true if emphasis is put on the word
militant and a strong, sustained confrontation with the powers that be. But there is
another sense in which that is not true, because we came to a dead end, and it
seemed as though we could not continue to be militant in that same way.17
Kramer & Douglass Milestones wanted to make a film about rebirth, providing a mirror for all those who had been involved in the struggles to look into and
evaluate themselves, in order to go further. In a sense, it was not only the rebirth
of certain militant ideas and energies that was at stake, but the rebirth of a certain
cinema, a cinema of myth and dream, a cinema steeped in tradition and history.
Is it any wonder that at the end of their naive red period, the Cahiers du Cinma
celebrated the film as a positive example of a new militant cinema? Tired of their
own dogmatism and voluntarism, exhausted from the terror of the significant, the
Cahiers once again turned to their roots, to Bazin and his concern for morality, to
American cinema and its mavericks (a few months later Monte Hellmans Two-lane
Blacktop was heralded for its refutation of the old cinema of acute difference and
fatal necessity18). As a sort of counterweight for Ici et Ailleurs, which problematizes
any possible reflection on militant history by confronting all discourse with its own
lies, Milestones attempted to make the militant left tell its own story, by returning to
the foundations of classic American cinema: the travelogue, the Western, the communitarianism of John Ford and Anthony Mann. A strange return of the repressed.
But hadnt Passolini seen it coming all along: Excessive transgression of the code
can only lead to a nostalgia for it?

17. G. Roy Levin, Reclaiming our Past,Reclaiming our Beginning, interview with Robert Kramer
and John Douglas, Jump Cut 10-11, 1976
18. Pascal Bonitzer , Lignes et voies: (Macadam deux voies), Cahiers du cinema 266-267,
May 1976.

23

The fire next time

24

The dream is over, a voice tells us at the end of Chris MarkersLe fond de lair
est rouge (1977). When the smoke had cleared, all leftist resolve seemed to have
withered away. In France, Chile, Portugal and elsewhere, revolutionary movements
fizzled into rupture and defeat. In Italy and Germany, the hopes of the radical left
collapsed in violence and despair. In China, the Cultural Revolution turned out to
be a cruel failure, leading to famine and chaos. And so mourning began, mourning for failed hopes, mourning for possibilities that had turned in on themselves,
mourning for a sense of togetherness that had somehow collapsed into contorted
factionalism: a mourning without end. Soon enough, the energies of militant histories were overturned by some of those who had once fully embraced them. All that
the children of Marx and Coca-Cola and their actions had accomplished, so they
argued, was to pave the way for a rekindled capitalism, allowing our societies to
become free aggregations of unbound molecules, whirling in the void, deprived of
any affiliation, completely at the mercy of the law of capital. All resistance was said
to be futile, even suspect, in any case causing more harm than good. Revolt could
hardly change the world; it could only give rise to cruelty and catastrophe. History
was identified as an enormous, catastrophic ruin, perpetually piling wreckage upon
wreckage. The memory of the Gulags dissolved all memories of revolution, just as
the memory of the Shoah had replaced remembrance of antifascism. In claiming
to have delivered us from the fatal abstractions inspired by the radical ideologies
of the past, Western capitalism and its political system of democratic parliamentarianism presented themselves as a universal shield, protecting us from all forms of
terror and totalitarianism. Capitalism won the battle, if not the war, the voice says,
but in a paradoxical logic, some of the staunchest opponents of Soviet totalitarianism, these men of the New Left fell into the same whirlwind.
In 1977, the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 set a gruesome series of events
in motion, the Bologna uprising and the Egyptian Bread Riots collapsed violently,
and MargaretThatchersre-initiation ofprivatization announced the neoliberal turn.
In 1977, the Sex Pistols gave voice to the No Future generation, Jean-Franois
Lyotard wrote the first draft ofLa Condition Postmoderne, and former Marxists Bernard-Henri Lvy and Andr Glucksmann declared the impossibility of all revolutions.
In 1977, Chris Marker presented the first version of his requiem for the revolutionary
era (Le fond de lair est rouge), Robert Kramer documented the aftermath of the
last revolutionin 20th-century Europe (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal)
and Robert Bresson made his portrait of the lost generation of post-May 68 (Le Diable Probablement). According to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this was a generation
that rejected every form of commitment, because commitment for the films young
characters whom Bresson seems to understand so well is mainly an escape into
an occupation which keeps that commitment alive, an escape from the awareness that everything goes on regardless of you and your commitment.19

19. Rainer Werner Fassbinder interviewed by Christian Brad Thomson

A year later, Fassbinder would create his own vision of this third generation,
coming after those who had dreamed of changing the world and those who had
faded into violence, a generation which simply acts without thinking, which has
neither a policy nor an ideology, and which, certainly without realizing it, lets itself
be manipulated by others, like a bunch of puppets. After the collapse of utopian
rebellion into desperate dystopia, all that seemed to be left was an overwhelming
sense of bitterness and nihilism. Nothing but lost illusions, utopias gone wrong, ruins amidst the ruins. As if despair, as Godard mentioned in Numero deux, became
the ultimate form of criticism.
At the same time that the leftist era crumbled under the weight of historical
fatality, a certain utopia of cinema was believed to have come to an end. Serge
Daney once claimed that Pasolinis death in November 1975 a few weeks before
the release of Sal, which was his own personal cry of desperation marked the
point when cinema stopped playing the role of sorcerers apprentice and became
a consensual landscape, instead of the space for division and confrontation that it
used to be. The politicization of cinema whether in content or in form that had
been associated with the upheavals and the hopes of the 1960s and 70s, gave
way to a general feeling of disillusionment and powerlessness. Just as the failure
of the October Revolution had accompanied the end of the utopia of cinema as a
mystical marriage between art and science, poetics and community, the implosion
of leftist dreams accompanied the dissolution of the idea of cinema as a realm
of discord or a weapon in the struggle. What had once been called militant or
political film had disappeared in the shadows of a bygone time that was best left
to forgetfulness. In 1977, Daney explained why Cahiers du Cinma, after having
abandoned the ideological critique of the non-legendary years, too lost interest in
the familiar models of militant cinema:

It is because it failed to furnish this imaginary encounter with the people,

because there were nothing but sectarian films, made hastily by people who didnt
care about cinema Today I think that militant films have the same defect as
militant groups they have the Mania of the All: each film is total, all-inclusive. A
true militant cinema would be a cinema which militated as cinema, where one film
would make you want to see a hundred others on the same subject. 20
After the deluge, with the disappearance of the material reality of the struggles
and the horizons that gave them meaning, the existing forms of militant cinema
could no longer be sustained. Straub & Huillet shifted their dialectical dispositive to
a lyricalone (Dalla Nuba alla Resistenza, 1978). Rocha put his remaining energies
into a self-destructing anti-symphony (A Idade da Terra, 1980). Oshimas Brechtian
articulations of revolutionary desire in the light of political repression gave way to
portrayals of the exasperation and impotence of desire (Ai no corrida, 1976). As
if desire could no longer be thought of as a mode of resistance, but only one of
escapism: is this not the sentiment that has been haunting us since the end of the

20. Serge Daney in conversation withBill Krohn (1977)

25

1970s? The overflow of democratic mass individualism, that which the 1968 generation was supposedly seeking all along, has allegedly culminated in an infinite drift
of narcissistic consumers who do not care for anything but the instant satisfaction
of their own needs and desires: this is the narrative that the contemporary left has
embraced. The same criticism that used to denounce the society of the spectacle
and the mythology of consumer ideologies in view of possible change had started
to turn on itself, trapping itself in an endless vicious cycle in which the power of the
market can no longer be distinguished from the power of its denunciation. As if
everything equals everything else, and all resistance is futile. As if we are now all
political realists, stuck in an endless refrain of consensual melodies, stuck with the
way things are, this natural order of things that the character of Ned Beaty so
vigorously evangelized in Network (1976).

26

But we can not continue much longer on the way of disillusion, wrote Daney
towards the end of his life. Despite his growing disenchantment with the dissolution of the cinema that he had so much cared for, the cin-fils still put his wager
on optimism. Between the spectacle and the lack of images, is there a place
for art to live with images, at the same time demanding them to be humanly
comprehensive (to better know what they are, who makes them and how, what
they can do, how they retroact on the world) and keep at their core this remnant
that is in-human, startling, ambiguous, on the verge?21 With Daney, we can ask how
we might gain a renewed trust in the power of the image. How can we get out of
the fatalistic scepticism that the society of disdain has bestowed on us? Can the
history of militant cinema, beyond all rhetoric, still infuse us with a much-needed
sense of risk, adventure and emancipatory potential? It is clear to us now that the
belief in the causal relations between affection, understanding and action, which
once provided the basic foundation for militant cinema, is no longer valid: the lack
of any horizon of change has made sure of that. It has also become increasingly
clear that the overwhelming feelings of disorientation and disappointment, the
sense of something lacking or failing that arises from the realization that we inhabit
a violently unjust world, all too easily sweep us away into the never-ending depths
of fear and nihilism. The challenge, then, is to break with this dominant discourse
that tells us that any notion of politics is constantly undermined by disillusionment.
Now that cinema, being unsure of its own politics, is once again encouraged to
intervene in the absence of the proper political, the question is how it can generate
a new power of affirmation, one that is consistent with the interruption of the logic
of resignation evidenced by recent uprisings, one that breaks with the febrile sterility of the contemporary world. In a time when capitalism has colonized most of our
dream life, can cinema once again become a laboratory of distant dreams, invigorating a new sense of the impossible, something to hold on to, hold on dearly?
Stoffel Debuysere

21. Serge Daney, Lexercicea t profitable, monsieur, P.O.L, 1993, p. 210

Godards Latest Scandal

By Glauber Rocha
Originally published as O ltimo escndalo de Godard in Manchete, n. 928, 31 January 1970.

This years talk of the town will beVent dest, the latest film by Jean-Luc Godard,
made afterLe gai savoirand beforePravda. An Italian film. Still a complete mystery.
This grande fofoca is possibly of the same stature as La dolce vita. Cineriz, a big
distributor associated with Rizzoli publishers, has paid an advance of one hundred
thousand dollars to producer Gianni Barcelloni for a western in colour written by
Cohn-Bendit, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and featuring Gian-Maria Volont. Does
the film meet the requirements of Cineriz? I saw the first, secret screening, in the company of the producer and a lawyer. Cineriz, suspecting that the film would have nothing in common with what they expected, are threatening to sue the producers and
ask for their money back, but as yet none of them has seen the film, on which subject
the craziest jokes are going around. For example, I met this young guy who asked
me, Have you heard? In Godards far-west, there are two horses reciting Mao!
Gianni Barcelloni asked me for a cigarette ten minutes into the screening, and
while lighting the match, I noticed he was in tears. Next to him, the lawyer kept his
lips firmly sealed. At the end of the row of seats, Ettore Rosbuck, a young millionaire with long hair, was wrapped in silence. After ten minutes, the film is still in its
first scene, a scene showing a couple a youngsters lying around in the grass, while
on the soundtrack we can hear a political discussion, with the sound distorted
typical Godard, a specialized snob would say. But the joke stops there. After the
first half hour, the lights come on and the lawyer, in a frenzy, says, I agree with
Godards words, but this is not a film! Cineriz will sue us!
So I answered: Listen, doctor, what technically determines the definition of a film is
the length of printed pellicule, sound and image. Scientifically, the film does exist.
The lawyer answered, I am a practical man. It is the judge who will say that this is
not a film.
So I responded to the lawyer, Sir, there is no legislation that says what a film is, in
esthetic terms. If a judge ever ruled that this is not a film, you can appeal.
In the middle of this conversation, the lights go out and an image appears in which
Godard, in his protestant pastors voice, asks what a film is. The lawyer breaks out
in laughter, and Godard continues with an image showing Gian-Maria Volont on
a horse, dragging along the body of an Indian.

27

What is a film? Every day, the bosses ask filmmakers to make films. The boss could
be Brezjnev-Mosfilm, or Nixon-Paramount. The scene we are seeing now is typical
of a Hollywood western: an officer of the American cavalry torturing an Indian. The
scene is repeated, but this time the officer is reading a fashionable revolutionary
book. In this scene we see an image and we hear the sound of a progressive film,
such as those presented yearly at the festivals in Pesaro or Leipzig: a film that is
the same as the reactionary films weve seen before, since it shows the same spectacular images, with false content.
After that, several other images are shown and numerous questions are asked
about militant cinema, always in the spirit of rigorous self-critique. I tell the lawyer,
You have seen it now: the discussion will go far. If the judge behaves like an ass,
call Moravia, Lvi-Strauss, Marcuse, Sartre. A Godard film can take a hit: Cineriz
would prefer to loose a hundred thousand dollars than to loose face.
The lawyer hasnt heard me, hes completely fascinated by the film. Barcelloni is
praying. Ettore seems possessed by this bestial silence that captures one in the
presence of the indecipherability of a genius.

28

More images follow, filled with quotes and discussions, and then the film ends. The
lawyer is even more furious now and I say while getting up, In my opinion, the
only problem with the film is that at this time it will not pass the Italian censorship.
Other than that, it is as good and as commercial as all the others.
The lawyer calls me an optimist and leaves. I go out with Jos Antonio Ventura, the
films sound engineer, and I tell him several things. The sound editing is brilliant.
Godard will end up making a record one day. It is not a political film as Godard
usually makes them: it is rather an anarchist film in the line of Artaud and Jarry.
From elsewhere I call Escorel22 and I tell him all that. We ask ourselves if Paul Emilio
Salles Gomes23 would like it. Surely. A bit later, still with Ventura, Its a bit of a joke.
With a hundred thousand dollars, we could have created a film industry in Brazil!
When I reach Gianni, I say, There is something in the editing of sounds and images, something that irritates me: a bourgeois anarchism, a destructive moralism,
something taking itself seriously. What if, Gianni, Bach had put leftist phrases in
his music, in order to make himself heard at a music festival? Or if Mondrian had

22. Eduardo Escorel has been a major figure in Brazilian cinema since the 1960s. He edited,
amongst others, Rochas Terra em Transe (1967) and O Drago da Maldade contra o
Santo Guerreiro (1969).
23. Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes (1916-1977) was was a leading Brazilian intellectual and film
critic. His writings include a biography of Jean Vigo and Cinema: trajetria no subdesenvolvimento (Cinema: Trajectory in Underdevelopment).

29

Groupe Dziga Vertov, Le Vent dest (1970)

painted leftist legends on his tableaux? Or even in Brazil, if Tom24 had succumbed
to the pressure, and had utilized leftist words for his music? You know, Gianni, I
remember when old Nicholas Ray told me in Cannes, Whenever I see a Godard
film, Im not always interested in the images, which are very beautiful. The big
problem with Jean-Luc is that he doesnt have the courage to speak himself!
Gianni answers, Jean-Luc, he worries me.
I turn to good old Ventura, You know, Z, Godards big frustration is that he
doesnt succeed in creating a political climate; he doesnt dispose of any violence.
He always approaches reality in a theoretical way. When he shows the officer of
the American military torturing a student, he doesnt generate any terror. The shot
is extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful shots in cinema, a shot made to
make cinephiles swoon.
Thats right, consents Z, In the scene in which the officer attacks the demonstrator, he wanted to have a brutal scene, and he really asked me to raise the sound,
and what remains, as youve seen, is this simple scene, almost lyrical.
But the scene has turned out brilliantly, I respond to Z, because the four camera movements that he made are absolutely unprecedented in film history.

30

Yes, really beautiful!, whispers Z.

Z, I continued, the more I think about it, the more Im against the film, because
its us who are the weak part in it. This film is an instrumentalization of our misery
by a French bourgeois who is doing his own thing, explaining Marxism, a subject
that I dont know very well, but I dont think he understands it either. If a professor
of political science were to help out, perhaps that would please him. Having said
that, there is something, perhaps this desperate attempt to explain Marxism, that
doesnt respond very well to todays problems. And then I dont know It seems to
me that the film is a big joke!
It is useless to continue to describe my reactions toVent dEst. In Brazil, when an
intellectual doesnt like a film from the new cinema, he says with the tone of a
great wise man: This is not a film!
A film for intellectuals generally obeys the American model, which they have been
seeing since childhood and which they place alongside their Oedipus complex: the
least provocation, and its immediately taken as pretentious idiocy. One day on the

24. Antnio Tom Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (1927-1994), also known as Tom Jobim,was a Brazilian songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, and pianist/guitarist. He was
a primary force behind the creation of the Bossa Nova style.

beach, an intellectual from Rio told me, I dont likeEl Justicero25 because the camera is always static, and in a comedy, the camera has to move!
And in groups, they all behave like babas. The fashionable intellectuals who already have a model of modern cinema in mind, in line with Godards work:Vent
destwill freak them out. And to the youngsters who have been imitating Godard
for the last five years or so, I address a warning: they should move fast, because in
his two next films, Jean-Luc is capable of reinventing everything and even the infernal bazar of tropicalismo wont help them conceal their old-style soccer game, nor
make the goals against the teams of their colleagues. Sadly, it seems, withVent
dEst, the Godard fashion has come to an end, and its Jean-Luc who is ending it
himself, horrified by his own brilliance. These are the last words I tell Ventura:
The tragedy is that in all of Latin America, it will be wild imitation all over again,
and just as the Africans should show all the white folks the door, we should prevent
foreign films from coming to Brazil. Brazilian cinema can only evolve if the audience, the critics and the filmmakers only see Brazilian films. For Godard, cinema
is over, and for us, cinema is only beginning. In Brazil, a cameraman like Dib Lufti
makes a long shot la main and the whole world vibrates; if Godard saw that, he
would fall to the ground in tears.
In front of this man, skinny, bald, forty years old, I feel like an affectionate aunt
who is ashamed to give sweets to a sad nephew. The image is silly, but Godard provokes a great sentiment of affection. Lets talk seriously: its like Bach or
Michelangelo eating spaghetti swamped with cockroaches, thinking that its not
worth painting the Sistine Chapel or composing the Actus Tragicus. Because he is
like that, Godard today, more humble than Francis of Assisi, ashamed of his own
genius, excusing himself to the whole world, crying like a child when Barcelloni
scoffed him, complaining of feeling abandoned, of being a wreck, the glory of
being the greatest filmmaker since Eisenstein weighing on his Swiss bourgeois
anarcho-right-wing shoulders. Please, lets stop that. I am only a worker in cinema,
so dont talk to me about cinema: I just want to cause revolutions, help humanity.
There he is, calling the merry May leftist club for help, using production money to
pay for a nice holiday in Sicily, leaving Cohn-Bendit and his hysterical Mao-Spontec
discussions behind and rushing to Paris to show some excerpts of his film on Czechoslovakia, coming back to Rome out of breath to declare that he doesnt want to
make money with the film, criticizing me of having a producers mentality. Then he
asks me to help him destroy cinema. I tell him that what Im into is something else:
I tell him that my business is creating cinema in Brazil and the Third World. Then he
asks me to play a role in the film and if I want to shoot a scene inVent destand
being the old monkey that I am I tell him to calm down, because I am only there
for the adventure and Im not clownish enough to embark in the gigolos collective
folklore of the unforgettable French May.

25. El Justicero by Nelson Pereira dos Santos (1967)

31

To simplify, Godard sums up all the questions of todays European intellectuals: is

art worth making? The question is an old one, Paulo Francis26 would say: Joyce has
also destroyed the novel! And thats what is so annoying in Europe today: the issue
of the usefulness of art is old, but it is in fashion and, in cinema, its up to Godard
alone to come to grips with the crisis. Godard is what Fernando Ezequile Solanas27
is to us in Buenos Aires. The truth, however, whether our intellectual fellow countrymen want to hear it or not, is that European and American cinema has gone up a
road without hope, and its only in the Third World countries that there is a way left
to make cinema. Thats where the crisis resides and why Godard (and co.) has a
lot to do with us. In Vent dest,he asks me what the roads of cinema are, and he
himself gives the answer: That way is the cinema of aesthetic adventure and philosophical inquiry, while this way is the Third World cinema a dangerous cinema,
divine and marvelous, where the questions are practical ones: production, distribution, training three hundred filmmakers to make six hundred films a year for Brazil
alone, to supply one of the worlds biggest markets.

32

I repeat: That is the difference. On the one hand, there is a general exhaustion
financed by big capital, and even Godard, in his desperation and as much as he
wants to escape it, makes film after film, financed by the system itself that, from
its side, doesnt care if Godard attacks it with all his strength, because cinema is
also exhausted and the whole world is collapsing in attendance of the Bomb.Vent
destis financed by Ettore Rosbuck, and this young man represents Fiat. Because
its Fiat that has been financing the most anarchist and terrorist films in recent
times, and basically Ettore doesnt care one way or the other, because for himVent
destis as inoffensive as any other work of art, and the great beauty of this film is
just this: its desperate beauty, born imperceptibly of the exhausted intelligence
of poetry. On the other hand, tired of running, but still devoid of reflection, we are
here, we, the others from the Third World, and we ask permission to film.
Godard and co. are above zero. We are below zero.
We dont have the big capital to back us up. On the contrary, we have vicious
censorship on our backs. We also have an audience that hates our films because
its drugged out on commercial foreign and national films, and on top of that market, we also have the intellectuals who hate our films because they are drugged
out on Godard films, and who hate us because we dare to make films in a country
that doesnt have stars like Gary Cooper and doesnt speak a language that knows
how to say I love you. The difference is simply that, and that is why its worthwhile, I think, to say one last thing about Godard:

26. Paulo Francis(1930-1997) was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic.
27. Fernando Ezequile Solanasis an Argentine film director, screenwriter and politician. His
films includeLa hora de los hornos(1968).

The art in Brazil (or any other country in the Third World) makes sense, yes sir! The
underdeveloped country that does not have a strong or madly national art is to be
pitied, because, without its art, its all the weaker (its brain can be colonized), and
its here that the most dangerous extension of economic colonization can be found.
In the specific case of cinema, I want to let my colleagues know that they should
endure the criticism, the slander and the contempt without wavering, because I am
absolutely convinced that Brazilian cinema novo is currently producing images and
sounds that are what we can call modern cinema.
After seeingVent dest,I havent said these last words to the lawyer, because that
doesnt interest him, but now I would like to say to everyone, interested or not interested, in the faraway homeland I love so much:
I have seen from up close the corpse of Godard, having committed suicide, up
there on the screen, projected in 16mm. It was the dead image of colonization. My
friends, I have seen the death of colonization! If I have been a privileged Brazilian,
my apologies, but by spreading this news, I just want to let it be heard: WE HAVE
TO CONTINUE TO MAKE CINEMA IN BRAZIL!

Translated by Stoffel Debuysere, with the help of Mari Shields

33

Glauber Rochas A Idade da terra will be screened on Sunday 6 April,

in the context of the film program Across the Margins, Beyond the
Pale (Re-imagining the post-colonial)

The Testament that Godard has Never Written

While Watching Ici et Ailleurs

Masao Adachi
Written in 2002. French version published in Le Bus de la rvolutionpassera bientt prs de
chez toi, edited by Nicole Brenez and Go Hirasawa (EditionsRougeProfond, 2012)

1. About the black screen, once more

34

To be honest, until I watched Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), my memory

of Godards cinema was merged in my head with all the other films of the Nouvelle
Vague. They were mixed up in a blurry silhouette that seemed to erupt from a magic lantern. But then again, for those who know Godards films, this blur of memories
isnt all that surprising.
And yet. While watching Ici et Ailleurs, my vague memories were going in all
directions, and every image, every sound was mutating into a tidal wave, sweeping
me away from all sides. Was I really watching Ici et Ailleurs, or was it my memory,
in which I had buried all those memories and those intimacies, which was forced to
open itself like an old book of magic spells with stuck-together pages? I was in the
grip of a great confusion.
Suddenly, in the middle of this wave of sounds and images, I could not help
noticing once more that my memories of Godard and his group were above all
tied to their force as militants, their capacity to evoke the agonies of their contemporaries. Ici et Ailleurs manifests a spirit that we shared with comrades all over the
world, mobilized as we were by the march towards the creation of a new world.
The film recounts the shadows of the historical time and space as we lived it back
then. It is an account that demonstrates the painful road travelled by those who
marched without halt in the middle of those shadows, towards a confiscated goal.
It is often said that Godard continued on this road with several other films, but
it is above all in Ici et Ailleurs that he tried, through his own desperation, to narrate
the problems of a whole era. In his inability to let himself whither away because
of this desperation, he has left us this ultimate letter, addressed to all those who
will survive him, a sort of testament. Twenty-seven years after being made, not a
single word has aged. On the contrary, I think that these are words that resonate in
the most lively way possible in todays world, in 2002. They reflect the effervescence
of agitators who were very much alive in the spirit of the time. In addition, the sorrow and the irritation of a Godard who was constantly in search of a new life force
for cinema has reminded me of this era, and the zeal that emerged from it.
I have also made a decisive discovery in Ici et Ailleurs.
Godards group, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, used the method of the
tableau noir, or black screen, in a perfect example of this cinematographic language that he and others developed, and which as he said, proposed to make
possible the realization of our images and sounds, our cinema. In other words,
they wanted to express a message by way of silence. At that time, I criticized that

method, wondering if it wasnt simply some sort of flight towards aphasia. But this
time, while watching this black screen, I told myself that Godard was giving us
an alarm call, warning us of danger, a trap: We are being seen so we dont see
anything. I was unable to sense this other message at the time, this despair of an
era during which Godard, with such dedication, explored ways to make himself
understood by all.
I might be reproached for repeating the same things over and over again, but
I really want to write Godard about this profound and new emotion that I felt while
watching Ici et Ailleurs.

2. The possibilities of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine

There are several points that link Godard and myself. The most obvious concerns our common commitment to the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Let
us think, from our point of view, about what Godard and his friends were able to
consider as possibilities to explore, and what has, in contrast, disappointed them,
and then compare their positions with the actions and analyses that my comrades
and myself conducted at the time. In other words, it is about asking, in the light
of this commitment to the liberation of Palestine, of what this despair of an era
contained in the black screen wants to tell us. We have to clarify the message that
Godard tries to communicate, and the reasons that have pushed him to change the
title from Jusqu la Victoire (Until Victory) to Ici et Ailleurs.
We can already discern an answer in the process of self-transformation undertaken by Godard and his comrades. They indeed clearly adapted themselves to
the characteristics of the process of development of the struggle for the liberation
of Palestine.
After 1968, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) assumed the role of
leadership of an ethnic movement. It passed from a political and peaceful activity
to armed struggle. The PLO defined this strategic defensive war as the last stage
of the resistance, and reinforced offensive armies against the Israeli occupier.
When Godard travelled to Palestine in 1970, the organization was at the height of
its activities and the Palestinians finally began to acquire an identity on an international level. The PLO imposed itself as the principal representative of the Palestinians. It is important to point out that the 1,500,000 refugees, who had been rejected
by the bordering Arab countries, who lived in misery and suffering and were asking
for the liberation of their homeland, had become the principal actors in the struggle, and that it was because of them that the Palestinian government in exile
was formed. Since then, the forces of the Palestinian liberation have led numerous
military operations across the occupied territories.
It was in this context that Godard, in collaboration with the PLO, decided to
realize a documentary film about the reality of the struggle. Godard declared his
position at the beginning of Ici et Ailleurs: From February till July 1970, we I,
you, she, he, go to the Middle-East, to the Palestinians, to make a film. And we
have filmed things in this order and we have organised the film that way saying:
here is what was new in the Middle East. Five images and five sounds that had
not been heard or seen on Arab soil. The peoples will + the armed struggle = the

35

36

peoples war + the political work = the peoples education + the peoples logic =
the popular war extended, until the victory of the Palestinian people.
To summarize, Godard here evokes the road of a war of the people. He declares his support for the armed struggle of the PLO, acknowledging that the liberation of Palestine had not been possible in a peaceful manner and that the Palestinians had no other choice than to engage in a long popular war against Israel, with
an army in which equality between man and woman was considered necessary.
Those were the principal themes, and they were as important for Godard as for the
PLO. In substance, the method taken up by Godard can be summarized as follows:
to use sound and image to paint a frontal portrait of the people in revolution.
When Godard was getting ready to finish the film, Black September happened,
the month in which there was a real massacre of Palestinian fighters. At that time,
Israel was not the only one fearing the victory of the Palestinians. Various Arab
countries also thought there was a risk that too great an influence of the Palestinian
conscience in their respective countries could take down their own regimes. Then
the government of Jordan found itself confronted with such nationalist slogans as
Let us transform Amman into Hanoi!, launched by the Palestinians. Fearing a coup
dtat, it in turn started to engage in its own oppression of the Palestinian forces.
The violence of the coup inflicted on Palestine during this event certainly gave
Godards group food for thought. Numerous collaborators were killed and the
production of the film found itself in crisis. And that is not all. The extremely abrupt
change of the conditions in which the Palestinian forces found themselves must
have led Godard to completely rethink the form of the coproduction. The filmmaker
was obliged to look for new possibilities to continue to work with the PLO.
We cannot exclude the idea that in order to revive the production of Jusqu la
victoire, the group was considering taking up the events of Black September in the
film. The importance of this drama demanded a reworking of the strategy for the
liberation of the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the PLO evidently did not want to increase its hostility towards the Jordanian government or worsen the antagonisms at
the heart of the Arab population, already brought to light during Black September.
The PLO could not go along with Godards proposition, as it advocated a reinforcement of the nationalist movement and the popular war to resolve the internal
conflicts within the whole of the Arab countries.
This information was given to us soon after we arrived in Palestine ourselves,
where we were confronted with the same problem. So it seems to have been political issues that prevented the production of Jusqu la victoire from being finished.

37

Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miville, Ici et Ailleurs (1970-1976)

3. Significant differences despite commonalities

38

In 1971, we started the production of a documentary film depicting the conditions of struggle for the liberation of Palestine, somewhat similar to what Godards
team were doing. Then we had to face yet a new tragedy for the Palestinian
camp: the battle of Jarash28. The royal Jordanian army, together with the Israeli
army, launched a menacing attack, wiping out a whole Palestinian battalion on the
mountains of Jordan, which was an outpost for the offensive against the territories
occupied by Israel. In the middle of shooting the film, we witnessed the determination of the Palestinian forces who, far from willing to retreat, either militarily or
politically, persisted on the road of armed struggle. Our film, Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai
Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War), reflects this situation. Realized in collaboration with the FPLP, it is a document that we later showed
in Japan, as well as in certain Palestinian camps and in Europe.
Our engagement with Palestine consisted above all in experimenting with militant cinema in the context of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, while at the
same time supporting the struggle in Japan, in order to create a global solidarity in
favour of armed struggle.
Fundamentally, Godards engagement had the same starting point as our own.
We had in common a position and a will to change the old system that dominated
the era in which we were living. That is what led us to voice our support for the
transformation of the struggle in popular war, by and for the people. But the shift in
the politics of the PLO created a gap between our points of view, and it eventually
imposed a change of method in our respective cinematic approaches. Godard and
I have each drawn our own conclusions, and these have led to different responses.
At the start, we shared with Godard a desire to experiment with the new possibilities of cinema. The events, however, led us to reconsider the fundamental question
of our way of working on the resolution of the problems linked with the development
of a cinematic activism, starting from zero. This question was crucial. We had to include in the global vision a common experience of the research of possibilities of the
worldwide revolution, symbolized by the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.
This is why the differences that separate us have given birth to films underlining those differences, despite the proximity of our commitments. It is also about
questioning to what extent our films, or rather the similarities and the differences
between our approaches to cinematic activism, could be linked to the worldwide
revolutionary movement. Our differences are not determined by our vision of the
revolution, but rather concern our respective conceptions of the strategy that the
movement of worldwide solidarity had to adopt.
This being said, the particularities and the contradictions that distinguish us
are well and truly discernable in Ici et Ailleurs and Sekigun-PFLP. At the point when
we were working on the production and distribution of our film and when I joined
the international forces for Palestine, Godard and his group abandoned their film.
After five years of tormented reflection, they decided to rework Jusqu la Victoire
into Ici et Ailleurs.

28. Referred to as Gaza Camp, Jerash is home to Palestinian refugees who fled the Gaza Strip
after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

It is perhaps not pertinent to compare the results, but as we finished our film
and engaged with an activist movement, we couldnt help wondering why Jusqu
la Victoire was not completed in collaboration with the PLO and why a hiatus
of five years separated this first draft from Ici et Ailleurs. Could Godard and his
group have refused to finish the film for uniquely political reasons, because of a
difference of opinion with the PLO? Or perhaps the independent financial resources dried up, making the continuation of the shooting impossible? Until I finally
watched Ici et Ailleurs, I thought all these reasons were possible.
Today, I dont think I was completely wrong, but I have to admit that I wasnt
completely right either. Actually, during the period when the production drew to a
halt, Godard and his comrades did not question the spatial and temporal void that
separated Palestine and France. They had instead given priority to a reflexion on
the transformation of existence at the heart of our societies. Later, they reformulated their reflection in regards to their commitment to Palestine, which was failing.
They acknowledged the weakness of their subjectivity and integrated this in a new
structure that constitutes the principal message of Ici et Ailleurs.
Godard said it himself: And then we came back home. I came back, you
came back. In fact we havent recovered yet. We finally came back. She, he, you,
I. I came back to France. It wasnt working out. And then days passed, months
passed. Its not going well anywhere. Nowhere. I cant do anything. In France, you
soon dont know what to do with the film. Very quickly, as they say,the contradictions explodeand you with them. He rather openly confesses being torn between
France and Palestine, suffering after having stopped the production of the film.
This means that the disputes concerning the content of the film and the lack of
funding were not the only reasons. What then were the other motives? I think that
the filmmakers were asking themselves how to build a bridge to the new stage of
the struggle: going beyond their belonging to society, even though they were socially and politically divided.
If this is the case, one has to ask in which way the team and Godard himself
proceeded to sublimate their desire, so far away from Palestine. Did they maybe
take some distance, during some time, from their involvement with Palestine? In
truth, this was not at all the case. In fact, Ici et Ailleurs reveals itself as an experimentation with new methods susceptible of responding to and coping with a new
context for the struggle. These are valid not only in regards to the commitment to
Palestine. Ici et Ailleurs also constitutes a tipping point, after which Godard began
a change in his cinematographic methods.

4. The desire to pass the border again

What stimulated Godard to take up the project again? At what point, while
being so far removed from Palestine, did he pick up the abandoned Jusqu la
Victoire film, to deconstruct it and recompose it in the form of Ici et Ailleurs?
From the remaining material, Godard chose five images and five sounds: The
peoples will + the armed struggle = the peoples war + the political work = the
peoples education + the peoples logic = the popular war extended. He has not
been able to alter them. In Ici et Ailleurs, the authors become attached to else-

39

40

where (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan). The words of this language, in spite of the events
that have struck Palestine, do not change. Here, that is to say in France, such
words are considered non-existent.
Godard says it himself in the film: Probably, in attempting to add hope to dreams,
we have made adding errors, Its true that we never listened to silence in silence.
We wanted to crow victory right away. And whats more, in their place. If we wanted
to make the revolution in their place, its maybe because at that time, we didnt really
want to make it where we were, and preferred to make it where we werent.
Godard continually poses the question of knowing what is keeping them at a
distance from this elsewhere, these scenes of struggle in the Arab and Palestinian liberation, in which he and his team had invested in the past. The films from the
US and the Soviet Union were what plundered the images and sounds. It is capitalism that seizes the time of life and relations between humans. It is Godard and
his friends themselves who are alienated and buried here, under the numerous
zeros, the coefficient of capitalism in France.
Godard and his friends wanted, once again, to go beyond the zeros and
once more face the battlefield of Palestine and other places, from here to elsewhere, from elsewhere to here. But what pushed them to take this turn? This
is only my hypothesis, but I am certain it has to do with what happened during the
Olympic Games in Munich in September, 1972. After the massacre of Palestinians
during Black September, after the massacre of Mount Jerash inflicted on the
Palestinian guerrillas, it was during the Olympic Games in Munich, just after the
battle of Lydda in May 1972, that members of the Palestinian guerillas broke into
the athletes village. They occupied the village, taking Israelis hostage in order to
demand the release of Palestinian prisoners of war. Television stations interrupted
their broadcasts of the games and relentlessly filmed the village where the guerillas barricaded themselves in with the hostages. It was a moment of tension that
Godard described as follows: In Munich, the force of imperialism was exerted
through television. Two billion spectators wanted a program.
While watching these broadcasts, Godard undoubtedly thought of a way to
counter the powerful imperialist message of television. If I am able to formulate
such a supposition, it is because we had exactly the same experience. In February
1972, when we were in Japan, working on Sekigun-PFLP, the Japanese Red Army
had taken hostages and entrenched themselves in a chalet in Asama.29 This event
was baptized the Battle of Asama. Television unceasingly turned its cameras on
the event. The authorities distilled a message that impelled spectators to expect
the great scene of the arrest of the guerrillas and the liberation of the hostages.
The whole of Japan was nailed to their seats. This message was more powerful
than any sound or word.
We can assume that what had awakened Godard and the others, torn
between here, Europe, and there, Palestine, and what led them to take up the
challenge to make Ici et Ailleurs, may have been the continuous broadcast of the

29. During nine days, the Japanese population could follow live television broadcasts of the
spectacular progress of this hostage-taking, which turned popular opinion against the leftist
movements.

scene of pitched battle between the Palestinian guerrillas and the special forces
that unfolded in Munich. This hypothesis seems acceptable to me. Godards comment in Ici et Ailleurs is extremely radical: Take advantage of the fact the world is
watching to say: show this image from time to time. If they refuse, take advantage
of a worldwide TV audience to say: You refuse to show this image. At each final,
for example. Ok, well kill the hostages and be killed afterwards. And for them as
for us, its silly to die for an image. And were a little scared
These words, full of bitterness, are spoken as a counterpoint to the moment
when we see the group searching for a way to show Jusqu la Victoire on television, with the authors carrying out a critical analysis of their own counter-information film: Looking back, the things that are described in these images are not all
that different than those we can see in whatever American or Soviet films.
What takes place is a singular process of sublimation that allows for a reversal
of the field of possibilities. Let us reconsider Godards words: : If we wanted to
make the revolution in their place, its maybe because at that time, we didnt really
want to make it where we were, and preferred to make it where we werent. Godard thus reconsiders his counter-information film in order to definitively conclude
the impossibility of its succeeding.
We can guess the meaning of the other message brought about by the black
screen. The black screen of the Godard cinema, combined with another crucial
term, the memory of the filmmaker, suggests a smothered howl stemming from
the authors soul. The memory that transcends time is both a past and a future. It
accompanies us towards a conscience of the present. It is most probably in this way
that Godard wanted to cross the border between here and elsewhere. It is not about
going forwards or backwards. It is not about being here or elsewhere. The
border depends on the positioning of forwards=backwards and here=elsewhere.
Do Godard and his comrades mean to imply that the equal sign (=) allows for the
infinite accumulation of zeros that links Soviet and American films?
What is really happening? I try once again to take time for an inner reflection
in front of this black screen. I dont know how much time I will be able to concentrate. I have to say that while hearing the news about Palestine and seeing Ariel
Sharon urging the butchers to continue their indiscriminate murder of Palestinians,
the interior of my mind already colours whiter and whiter with anger.
Thinking about it, the ultimate, heartbreaking message that Godard has sent
us in Ici et Ailleurs does not reside in the black screen, but in a screen made of the
purest white.
Translated by Stoffel Debuysere, with the help of Mari Shields

Ici et ailleurs and Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen will both be

screened on Thursday 3 April, in the context of The Fire Next Time.

41

42

43

Robert Kramer, Ice (1970)

 The impossible is the least

that one can demand.
James Baldwin

Santiago lvarez, 79 Primaveras (1969)

The Fire Next Time

Afterlives of the militant image
There was a time when cinema was believed to make a difference, to be
able to act as a weapon in struggle, to operate as a realm of discord. The socalled militant cinema was not only considered as a tool to bear witness but
also to intervene in the various political upheavals and liberation movements
that shook the world in the 1960s and 70s. What remains of this unassailable
alliance between cinema and politics?
After the flames had died down, all that seemed to be left was a wreckage of
broken promises and shattered horizons. Today it feels like we have been living
through a long period of disappointment and disorientation, while the sense of
something lacking or failing is spreading steadily. An overwhelming melancholy
seems to have taken hold of our lives, as if we can only experience our time as
the end times, when the confidence in politics is as brittle as our trust in images.
Perhaps that is why, for those who came after, there is a growing tendency to look
back at an era when there was still something to fight for, and images were still
something to fight with. Can a re-imagining of old utopian futures shed a new light
on our perceived dead-end present, in view of unexpected horizons? Can an understanding of past dreams and illusions lead to reinvigorated notions of responsibility, commitment and resistance? Can a dialogue with the period in question help
us to find the very principles and narratives capable of remedying its impasses?
And how can this questioning help us to think about how cinema, unsure of its own
politics, can be political today? In light of a potential rebirth of politics, would it
still be possible for the art of cinema to appeal to the art of the impossible?

The Fire Next Time is a program of interventions and screenings dealing with the
militant image and its resonances, in conjunction with the Courtisane Festival and
Lil se noie, an exhibition of work by Eric Baudelaire and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc at KIOSK. This event will take place in the framework of the research project
Figures of Dissent (KASK/HoGent) and in association with the EU project The Uses
of Art (confederation LInternationale).
With the support of the research groups S:PAM & PEPPER (UGent), art centre
Vooruit, BAM institutefor visual, audiovisual and mediaart, Eye on Palestine,
Embassies of France & Mexico.
All events are free admission, except where indicated.

45

Thursday 10:00 KASKcinema \ Talk-screening

Militant Cinema: from Third Worldism to

Neoliberal Sensible Politics
Irmgard Emmelhainz
Jean-Luc Godards Ici et ailleurs (1969-1974) as well as Chris Markers Le fond de
lair est rouge (1977) crystallize the histories of militant engagement and political
filmmaking in the 1960s, a time in which Marxism was a vehicle for cultural as well
as actual revolution here and elsewhere. From both films, lessons about this era of
militantism can be drawn. Moreover, they announce a turn in the 1970s and 1980s
toward minority politics (tied to de-colonization struggles) and humanitarization
which implies an ethical, as opposed to political relationship to the elsewhere, as
well as the utopia of globalization. Bearing this in mind, Irmgard Emmelhainz will
discuss the changes in the meaning of politicization and political work from the
1960s from what is known today as Sensible Politics: a form of politicization active
at the level of encoding unstable political acts in medial forms. Taking up Jean-Luc
Godards plea for texts and poetry (inspired by Aristotles and Hannah Arendts understanding of political action as speech), in his film Notre musique, she will argue
that most of the current politicized images are compensatory devices to the ravages
caused by neoliberal reforms implemented worldwide in the past two decades.

46

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent writer and researcher based in Mexico

City. In 2012, she published a collection of essays about art, culture, cinema and
geopolitics: Alotropas en la trinchera evanescente: esttica y geopoltica en la
era de la guerra total (BUAP). Her work about cinema, the Palestine Question, art,
culture and neoliberalism has been translated to French, English, Arabic, Turkish,
Hebrew and Serbian. She is currently co-editing an issue dedicated to Mexico City
of Scapegoat Journal, and teaching a course at the Esmeralda National School of
Engraving and Painting in Mexico City.
Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miville
Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere)
FR, 1976, 16mm, color, French & Arabic with English subtitles, 53

A film of the in-between, of the AND. Between then (1970) and now (1976), between
here (Paris) and there (Palestine), between what is shown and what is seen, between sound and image. In 1970 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin travelled
to the Middle East to shoot a film about the Palestinian liberation struggle, a film
that was initially titled Jusqu la victoire. A few weeks after returning to France,
the Amman massacres took place. After that, it took Godard more than five years
to find a form for the images and sounds he had captured, five years to come to
terms with a sense of loss and failure, with the death of so many of those he had
filmed, with the demise of so many revolutionary dreams.

The only way for Godard to escape from the irresolvable contradictions between
cinema and politics and the souring dilemmas of the militant filmmaker, was to
radically turn cinema in on itself, in a meditation on the power and powerlessness
of the image. A labor of mourning, of which we havent seen the end yet.
Hito Steyerl
November
DE, 2004, video, color, English spoken, 25

My best friend when I was 17, was a girl called Andrea Wolf. She died in 1998,
when she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist in Eastern Anatolia...This project tackles
the question of what is nowadays called terrorism and used to be called internationalism once. It deals with the gestures and postures it can create, and their
relationship to figures of popular culture, namely cinema. Its point of departure is
a feminist martial arts film Andrea Wolf and I made together when we were 17
years old. Now this fictional martial arts flick has suddenly become a document.
November is not a documentary about Andrea Wolf. It is not a film about the situation in Kurdistan. It deals with the gestures of liberation after the end of history, as
reflected through popular culture and travelling images. This project is a film about
the era of November, when revolution seems to be over and only its gestures keep
circulating. (HS)

47

Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miville, Ici et Ailleurs (1970-1976)

Thursday 13:30 KASKcinema \ Talk-screening

Landscape/Media an Investigation into the

Revolutionary Horizon, Reloaded
Sabu Kohso & Go Hirasawa

48

The development of Landscape Cinema and Landscape Theory took place during
the short period between the late 60s and early 70s in Japan, while the 60s movements were declining and the militant line of guerrilla warfare was rising. It embodied a collective effort to grasp a new horizon of revolutionary struggle and the
possible location of its agency in the form of film productions and critical discourses.
Initiated by an enigmatic film, AKA: Serial Killer (1969), the cinema/theory sought to
confront landscape as the main terrain for the power operation, seen by the gaze
of a migrant worker. Then Red Army/PFLP Declaration of World War (1971) was
produced, embodying the second stage of the development in which tactical uses
of reportage were juxtaposed over the everyday landscape of Palestine guerrillas.
Although the film was produced in collaboration with Japan Red Army, it involves
multiple messages including critical reflections on a broad orientation of Japans
radical left. Screening the latter film, Hirasawa and Kohso seek to decode the
problematic complexity of the cinema/movement, that tackles the mechanism of
capture by landscape/media and the resistance therein, in order to approach the
apocalyptic feature of planetary crises today.

Masao Adachi & Koji Wakamatsu, Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (1971)

Sabu Kohso is a writer and translator. Living in New York since 1980, he has published several books in Japan and Korea about urban space, radical politics, and
the philosophy of anarchism, and has translated books by theorists such as David
Graeber, John Holloway, Kojin Karatani and Arata Isozaki. After the Fukushima
nuclear disaster, he co-edited the website jfissures.org, and has written several
articles on the problematic of post-nuclear disaster society in English.
Go Hirasawa is a researcher at Meiji-Gakuin University working on underground
and experimental films and avant-garde art movements in 1960s and 70s Japan.
His publications include Cultural Theories: 1968 (Japan, 2010), Koji Wakamatsu:
Cinaste de la Rvolte (France, 2010), and Masao Adachi: Le bus de la rvolution
passera bientot prs de chez toi ( France, 2012). He has organized several film
programs on Japanese Underground Cinema.

Masao Adachi & Koji Wakamatsu

Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War)
JP/ Palestine, 1971, 16mm to video, color, Japanese & Arabic with English subtitles, 69

Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu visited Beirut on the way back from the
Cannes Film Festival in 1971. In collaboration with the Japan Red Army fighters
and the PFLP, they produced the film there, involving styles ranging from manifesto,
newsreel, critical reflection (of the Japanese left) to reportage (of everyday activities of the Arab guerrillas). A fusion of Tactical Media and Landscape Cinema
inherited from AKA: Serial Killer (1969), the film was considered an epitome of
cinematic engagement in revolutionary practice, along with the works of the Dziga
Vertov Group (Jean-Luc Godard/Jean-Pierre Gorin) and Latin American directors
including Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. In order to break out of the conventional distribution system, Red Bus Screening Troops were organized to travel
across Japan. The English and French subtitled versions were produced so that
they could be shown across the globe, including in Palestine.

49

Thursday 16:00 KASKcinema \ Talk-screening

Destroy Yourselves as Our Bosses

Evan Calder Williams & Victoria Brooks

50

The connected talks of Evan Calder Williams and Victoria Brooks develop a feminist history of, and approach to, militant cinema from 1973 to 1983. In particular,
they focus on critiques, both filmed and written, of how even allegedly radical
movements reproduced a hierarchy of legitimate concerns that consistently
framed the issues and modes of struggle posed by women as secondary to the
cause at hand. This sidelining and its proprietary relation to politics has a history
inextricable from labor movements themselves, but it becomes particularly visible
with how practices of cinema directly engaged in social struggles negotiate what is
literally foregrounded, drawn forth, or edited out. The first talk focuses on the Italian
situation in the mid-70s, considering free newsreel projects and experimental
documentaries and reading their recurrent focus on the factory and piazza through
the fierce critique articulated by Italian communist feminism in those same years.
The second talk deals with films focused on womens relation to factory and mining
struggles in Ontario. These films, including those by Sophie Bissonnette, Joyce
Wieland, and Sandra Lahire, developed a complex vision of histories and voices
continually pushed to the side of movements fighting for access to basic necessities
of survival.
Victoria Brooks is a curator and producer based in Troy, NY. Prior to joining
EMPAC (Experimental Media & Performing Arts Centre) in 2013 as curator of timebased visual art, Brooks was a London-based independent curator, co-founding the
itinerant curatorial platform The Island, co-curating Serpentine Gallerys artist-cinema program, and producing Canary Wharf Screen for Art on the Underground.
Together with Evan Calder Williams, she is currently organizing Third Run, a new
yearly film journal and colloquium series to be launched in fall 2014.
Evan Calder Williams is a writer, theorist, and artist. He has a doctoral degree
from the Literature Department at University of California Santa Cruz, where he
wrote a dissertation entitled The Fog of Class War: Cinema, Circulation, and Refusal in Italys Creeping70s. He is the 2013-2014 Fellow at the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons, where is developing atheory of sabotage. He is the author
of two books, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Roman Letters, has written
for Film Quarterly, Mute, La Furia Umana, Viewpoint, and The New Inquiry, and
writes the blog Socialism and/or Barbarism.

Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duckworth, Joyce Rock

A Wives Tale
CA, 1980, 16mm to video, color, English & French with English subtitles, 73

A film about the women who supported the 1978 miners strike against Inco, the
multinational which owned the nickel mines in Sudbury, Ontario. As the women
became increasingly involved in the strike, they questioned more and more their
traditional supportive role. This provoked many heated discussions among the
women and obviously not without upsetting husband, family, union and company This situation forced us as filmmakers to find a cinematic approach that
could capture this reality. It is difficult (impossible) to take pretty pictures under
these conditions: kitchens are small and dont well suit the movements of a film
crew; children scream and cry in the microphone, making it hard to hearwe often
packed up our equipment and decided not to shoot because we felt it would be
a betrayal of the trust we had established with the women. You may perhaps be
disappointed not to witness a family feudSo we shot a film that doesnt in fact
show everything. hoping that what is not obvious comes from between the lines,
between each frame of the film.

51

Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duckworth, Joyce Rock, A Wives Tale (1980)

Thursday 20:30 Minard \ Cinema-event

Mglichkeitsraum
(The Blast of the Possible)
Angela Melitopoulos & Bettina Knaup

52

The Blast of the Possible is a project containing the creation of a temporary

performance and lecture platform, a space for exhibiting video and film archive
materials belonging to the history of activist media since the 1960s. The design of
the platform is based on the idea of an extended postproduction studio in that all
functions of montage are spatially presented. This theatrical archive space recalls
the archaic function of theatre being a switching panel for different modes of language flows that foster potentials of experimentation, learning and the relation and
agency between language-modes. The imaginary developing from an index of the
databases and from the materiality of the archival documents will be transformed
and preformed through the live energy of performance and speech. Language,
as Walter Benjamin states, is mediating the immediacy of all mental communication, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of
language is its magic. Angela Melitopoulos & Bettina Knaup propose to concatenate different languages modes and work on their boundaries with performances
that mind the gap between memory and matter. The exhibition becomes a place
in that we sense the time quality of mediated images, their historical context, their
possible figures and pathologies, their spatial order and their construction and
segmentation, their open or closed logic of montage. Through these interventions
we can re-read documents and documentation, the construction of representation
and identity, the imaginary of the past and the potentialities of becoming.
Angela Melitopoulos studied fine arts with Nam June Paik at the Academy of Arts
in Dsseldorf. She has been working with electronic media since 1986 and has
created experimental single-channel tapes, video installations, video-essays and
documentaries, her work of artoften based on research and collaboration withother knowledge spheres likesociology, politicsand theory. She has recently been appointed professor in the Media School of the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen.
Bettina Knaup is a cultural producer with a background in political science, theatre, film, TV studies and gender studies. She has been involved in developing or
managing a range of interdisciplinary and transnational cultural projects operating
at the interface of arts, politics and knowledge production, including the open
space of the International Womens University (Hanover) and the trans-disciplinary
Performing Arts Laboratory, IN TRANSIT (Berlin).

Thursday 22:00 Minard \ Cinema-event

When we act or undergo, we must always be

worthy of what happens to us
Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri
The militant cinema and image, taken in a more strict sense, have historically
tended to push toward the real and toward the truth and toward the overcoming of
capitalism, colonialism, and sometimes patriarchy among other things. They have
worked to uncover, to lay bare, to expose, to clarify and at times to destroy existing
regimes of order and/or truth. Occasionally, there have also been engaged comrades who have chosen the path of militancy as an arena to also investigate the
truth claims of the image itself and its production. Of questioning the regimes of images themselves whether as spectacle or as contested fables or fictions. The utopic
in the latter camp assumed cinema must be destroyed in the struggle. The more
skeptical of this group, (in the philosophical sense not the everyday sense) returned
to the cinema as a place of diagnosing the limits and failures of movements, as
well as the images movements produced. This film is not about this history and the
antinomies of these various modes of militancy in cinema, here reduced to a kind
of caricature (quite common in historical accounts). It attempts instead to loiter
around the shards and remnants of the processes, struggles and gestures that
were produced in these varied forms of militancy in the hopes of discovering the
latent forces and insights they may retain for contemporary struggles.
Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri work together. Ayreen writes in fragments, and
makes films and videos. She is interested in philosophy, literature, the political and
the everyday. Rene is interested in the complex mechanisms that constitute the
world. He works within the folds of cultural practice, social thought and politics. Ayreen and Renes collaborative projects have evolved a great deal through their
frequent contributions to the programme at 16Beaver, an artist community that
functions as a social and collaborative space in downtown Manhattan, where the
group hosts panel discussions, film series, reading groups and more. Ayreen and
Renes Radioactive Discussion series was a physical counterpart to their fictional
Homeland Security Cultural Bureau project. Other collaborations include: Camp
Campaign, Artist talk, Radio Active, United We Stand, What Everybody Knows, Eden
Resonating, 7X77, Case Sensitive America and more.

53

Santiago lvarez, 79 Primaveras (1969)

Friday 10:00 KASKcinema \ Talk-screening

Memories of upheaval and tropical insurrection

Olivier Hadouchi, Basia Lewandowska Cummings,
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history, at a time when
many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption,
and authoritarianism, how can we rethink the past in order to reimagine a more
usable future? If the longing for revolution, the craving for the overcoming of the
colonial past and the reclaiming of national identity that shaped the cinemas of
liberation of the 1960s is not one that we can inhabit today, then it may be part
of our task to set it aside and begin an effort of reimagining other futures for us to
dream of. But how can we go beyond the nostalgia for past horizons that still (or
once again) seems to occupy our contemporary scope of imagination? Can an
answer be found in the work of the contemporary artists and filmmakers who are
attempting to reinvent and redirect the legacies of militant culture and Third cinema ? How to position ourselves today in view of this large corpus of historical film
works in a context that is radically different but at the same time dauntingly close?
A selection of formally and politically bold films from Latin-America will serve as the
starting point for a discussion on the relation between our dead-end present, and,
on one hand, the old utopian futures that inspired it and, on the other, an imagined
idiom of future futures that might reanimate this present and perhaps even engender in it unexpected horizons of transformative possibility.
Olivier Hadouchi is a critic, curator and film historian, based in Paris. He obtained
a PhD at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) on Cinema and Liberation
struggles around Tricontinentals constellation (1966-1975). He has written for
various publications such as CinmAction, Third Text, Mondes du Cinma, La Furia
Umana and has curated film programs for Le BAL, Btonsalon. le Cinmatographe
de Nantes and la HEAD (Genve).
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc is an artist, curator and researcher interested in exploring the history of the colonial encounter and its effects on memory and identity.
Amongst others, he is very concerned to engage with film history and the decolonisation of African states in the 1960s. Abonnenc recently took part in the Paris Triennial in the Palais de Tokyo and in group exhibitions in the Fondation dentreprise
Ricard (Paris) and the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, USA).
Basia Lewandowska Cummings is a writer, editor and film curator, based in
London. She has contributed to frieze, The Wire, Contemporary &, and The Quietus
and has curated film programmes for Bold Tendencies, Film Africa, the New York
African Film Festival, and Gasworks gallery. In January 2014 she became writer-in-residence at Jerwood Visual Arts, London.

55

Santiago lvarez
Now !
CU, 1965, 35mm, b/w, sound, 5

A montage film composed of stills dealing with the discrimination against blacks in
the United States, rhythmically edited after Lena Hornes song of the same name.
Ugo Ulive
Basta
VE, 1969, 16mm to video, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles, 14

Through the use of violent symbols (loosely associated with Artauds notion of
cruelty), some of the consequences of the current social organization in Latin-America are exposed: the alienation, marginalization and reification of men, and the
continuous presence of imperialism, considered as rape. (UU)
Santiago lvarez
79 Primaveras
CU, 1969, 35mm, b/w, sound, 24

A tribute to Ho Chi Minh, the revered leader of the Viet Min independence movement who had defeated French Indochina and founded the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam. The justly celebrated 12 minute sequence in which newsreel footage of
soldiers is destroyed exemplifies Alvarezs declaration that my style is the style of
hatred for Imperialism.

56

Nicols Guilln Landrin, Coffea Arbiga (1968)

Nicols Guilln Landrin

Coffea Arbiga
CU, 1968, 16mm to video, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles, 18

The Cuban Film Institute commanded Landrin to make a propaganda documentary to show how to sow coffee around Havana. The result is a didactic film, which
at the same time managed to betray the official proposal. The great irreverence:
the use in the soundtrack of a forbidden song by The Beatles, The fool on the hill,
when Castro walks to a podium for a speech. The documentary was exhibited but
banned as soon as the coffee plan collapsed.
Nicols Guilln Landrin
Desde La Habana1969! Recordar
CU,1968, 16mm to video, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles, 18

Steeped in verbal and visual repetitions, the film presents itself as a sort of chronicle
of the salient and traumatic events of the 1960s, but it also points out the oppressive effect of inescapable propaganda on daily existence. It was censured for being
inconsistent with the Cuban context.
Humberto Sols
Simparel
CU, 1974, 16mm to video, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles, 28

Simparel synthesizes the primary forms through which the Haitian people have
expressed themselves in the centuries since the islands colonization by the French
and the massive importation of African slaves to fuel its plantation economy. The
film acknowledges the powerful role which Afro-Haitian culture has played in these
peoples political struggle as both repository for peoples history and the raw material from which that history can be reconstructed and transformed.

Related Screening:
Saturday 5 April 17:30 Paddenhoek
Elke Marhfer, prendas - ngangas - enquisos machines (2013)
+ various films by Nicols Guilln Landrin (1965-1966)

57

Friday 13:30 KASKcinema \ Talk-screening

Splicing the Militant Cinema

Subversive Film (Mohanad Yaqubi & Reem Shilleh)
In 1968, a group of young filmmakers decided to establish a film unit affiliated
with the Palestinian Revolution newly active in Amman, Jordan. The unit was called
Palestine Film Unit (PFU) and was working with Al Fatah, one of the Palestinian
Libation Organization (PLO) factions that adopted armed struggle as the only
way to liberate Palestine. When the PFU was established, not only did it furnish
the revolution with cinematic vocabularies, but it also addressed the decades old
dilemma of invisibility of the Palestinian people and would offer apparatus for
reclaiming visibility. At a later time the work of the unit became a major part of the
Palestinian revolutionary cinema. This presentation tracks life and work of the PFU
and its members as an example of a militant cinema practice in the 1960s and
70s, when filmmakers believed cinema could change the world.

58

Subversive Film is a cinema research and production initiative that aims to cast
new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region; to engender support for film preservation; and to investigate archival practices and effects. Other
projects developed by Subversive Film to explore this cine-historic field include the
digital reissuing of previously-overlooked films, the curating of rare film screening
cycles, and the subtitling of rediscovered films. Subversive Film was formed in 2011
and is based in Ramallah and London.

Friday 16:00 KASKcinema \ Talk-screening

Dissident Images
Raquel Schefer, Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, Daphn Hrtakis
In 1982, in the short film Changer dImage - Lettre la bien aime (To Alter the Image), Jean-Luc Godard reflected upon the difficulty to produce an image of change
likely to induce and formally represent change. Can an image of change give rise
to change? Must an image of change be an altered image? A politics of aesthetics underlays these questions, as they point out to the poetics and politics of the
film image, to the intrinsic articulation of its aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions.
Representing current class struggle in Southern Europe, Daphn Hrtakis Ici rien
(2011) and Ramiro Ledo Cordeiros Vida Extra (2013) reclaim a poetic political cinema, leading a formal creative synthesis between historical legacy and emergent
audiovisual forms which undermines established categories. Daphn Hrtakis and
Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro will be present to show their work, to discuss these aporias
of image, aesthetics and politics, and to rethink the relationship between art and
politics in the context of an open collective debate.
Raquel Schefer is a filmmaker and researcher. She is presently doing a PHD in
Cinema Studies at the Universit de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3). Politics of
representation, remembrance and oblivion, the acts of telling and re-telling, and
the non-coincidence between sensorial memory and audiovisual mnemonics are
central issues in her work. Historical episodes are approached through personal
and familiar narratives, in some cases embedded in the history of Portuguese
decolonization.
Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro works as an independent filmmaker and a film editor. His
work, influenced by the thinking of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancire, reviews
political cinema in the light of an overall redistribution of the sensible. Vida Extra
(2013), inspired by Peter Weiss The Aesthetics of Resistance, proposes a cinema
praxis based on the recognition and the circulation of new forms of aesthetic
resistance. Re-enunciating the novel through refreshed narrative and aesthetic
forms, Ledo Cordeiro reverses the relation of facticity and fiction and reconciles
the struggle for political emancipation with sensible experience in the time of a
returning pavor nocturnus.

59

Daphn Hrtakis is an independent filmmaker and a student at Le Fresnoy. While

studying documentary film at Paris 8 University, Hrrakis directed Ici rien (2011),
an experimental film shot in Exarhia, prime centre of social protest in Athens. A collective dialogic portrait of a country in crisis, Ici rien is a major example of todays
experimental political cinema as it points out to a synthesis of historical aesthetic
forms and a new horizon of political expectations. Crisis is represented through
images of a joie de vivre.

Daphn Hrtakis
Ici rien
FR/GR, 2011, 16mm, Super 8 & Mini DV, color,Greek with English subtitles, 30

The shooting of this film started in september 2008, in Exarhia, a major centre of
social protest in the heart of Athens. As the months passed and the political situation of Greece evolved, the film became the canvas on which fragments of stories
finally found a place, composing the tattered landscape of a country in crisis. (DH)
Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro
Vida Extra
SP, 2013, video, color, Spanish with English subtitles, 96

60

The revolution is a game you surrender to for pleasure. Its dynamics are those
of the subjective fury of living, not those of altruism. Almost half a century later,
few things seem as far back in time as the International Situationist and its idea of
deconstructing the left. However, the current European collapse exposes, now more
than ever, the need for new forms of resistance against the strategies of evil and
their atrocious advance. In his directorial debut, Ramiro Ledo faces that idea of
re-enunciating through the only possible path: self-criticism. First part: an assembly
after the occupation of Barcelonas Spanish Bank of Credit. The images dont exist,
theyre just shadows and flashes that, added to the accumulation of slogans and
turns to speak, have the effect of a death certificate. Second part: a table talk, the
guests expose their fears and doubts about the indignados, the resistance, the
pickets, direct action... Both sides, opposed and indivisible, form what is perhaps
one of the most uncomfortable and tough Spanish films in recent memory. (BAFICI)

Friday 20:00 KIOSK \ Exhibition-opening

Lil se noie
Eric Baudelaire & Mathieu K. Abbonenc
Lil se noie is the result of an intuitive dialogue between two French artists whose
work stems from a shared interest in the gaps and fissures that make up (hi)stories,
as well as the challenges and promises they hold. At the heart of their practices
is a desire to open up and accentuate the tensions between what has been, what
seems to be, and what could have been, to pick up the traces of forgotten and unresolved questions and divert them towards uncertain destinations, out of the dead
end circuits where things and thoughts get trapped in their own finitudes. Indeed,
this is an exhibition about unfinished business, as one of the pieces in the show
suggests. Sometimes quite literally, as in the case of Mathieus search for Sarah
Maldorors Guns for Banta, a film dealing with the struggle for the Independence of
Guinea and Cape Verde that has never seen the light of day, or Erics makes (as
opposed to remakes) of some of Michelangelo Antonionis unrealized scenarios. In
other cases, their work consists of a rewiring of the connections between one sense
and another, or between one time and another, as in a va, a va, on continue,
which highlights the complications implicit in remembering, representing and voicing distant histories of anti-colonial revolt and revolutionary insurrection, or Chanson
dAutomne, an assemblage of clippings from The Wall Street Journal dated September 2008, revealing a poetry of resistance within the fracture lines of a dysfunctional
economic order. At odds with all laments of the death and the image and the end
of history, the works in this exhibition propose a renewed faith in the hidden potentialities of the present, puncturing the impasses and aporias of finitude, giving way
to spaces for wandering and wondering that are bound to remain incomplete.

Related Screening:
Sunday 6 April 11:00 Sphinx
Eric Baudelaire, The Ugly One (2013)

61

Friday 22:00 Minard \ Concert

Julius Eastman
Crazy Nigger - Gay Guerilla
What I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing
that attains to a basicness or a fundamentalness, and eschews that which is superficial, or, could we say, elegant There are 99 names of Allah, and there are 52
niggers. Julius Eastman, Jan 16 1980, Northwestern University

62

When Julius Eastman took the stage of the concert hall of the Northwestern
University to explain the titles of the pieces that he and three other pianists were
about to perform, he could not have known that this appearance would be the
most lasting statement about his music. Having studied with the likes of George E.
Lewis, Morton Feldman and Lukas Foss, all signs pointed towards a bright future for
this composer. By 1980 Eastman was performing his music all over Europe and the
States and he was an integral part of the thriving Downtown scene in New York,
where he recorded with Arthur Russell and Meredith Monk. But for all this promise,
his self-destructive behaviour inevitably caught up with him. When he passed away
on May 28 1980 in a hospital in Buffalo, the news took more than seven months to
reach New York. With the scarce recordings and scores of his music scattered all
over the place, attempts to reconstruct Eastmans output are doomed to remain
incomplete. Only fairly recently a selection of his work has been made available,
including the trilogy Evil Nigger,Crazy Nigger&Gay Guerilla, which represents in
so many ways the intense brilliance of this forgotten minimalist. These compositions for multiple pianos took the minimalist device of additive process to a whole
new structural level, building up immense emotive power through the incessant
repetition of rhythmic figures, a composing technique he called organic music. The
titles of the pieces exemplify the rebellious attitude of Eastman, as someone who
has always struggled with identity, yet never without casting a new life; someone
who has steadfastly eschewed compromise, yet giving rise to a body of work that
continues to startle and engage.

Musicians: Frederik Croene, Stephane Ginsburg, Bob Gilmore, Reinier van Houdt
Entrance fee: 8 / 10
In collaboration with art centre Vooruit.

SLON, Lojn du Vietnam (1967)

for full festival program and practical info see brochure

www.courtisane.be

Cover image: Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino & Grupo Cine Liberacin, La hora de los hornos (1968, poster)

Cinda Firestone, Attica (1974)