Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968 by Paul Douglas Grant

Abstract

Grant, Paul Douglas. Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-231-17667-5. Pp. 244. Scholarship on May 1968 is abundant, but some niches still need more documentation . In parallel to the worker and student discontent, on a different but not totally disconnected level, the early Sixties also correspond to the advent of the sync movie camera: smaller, handier cameras capable of recording image and sound simultaneously . These new tools were more than mere technological advances. Because of their reduced size, they needed smaller film crews thus were easily introduced into sites otherwise closed to the public such as workplaces, factories where walk-outs were taking place at the time. The true impact of the sync camera on the 1968 uprisings is hard to evaluate with certainty. Would the insurrections have been as intensely reported in the media and in factories around the country without the new cameras that were showing it all, or was it the events that gave extreme left amateur filmmakers and photographers a path to emerge from anonymity? There is no question however that a new type of cinema was born, or rather re-born since it borrowed much from Russian political cinema of the beginning of the century, including Aleksandr Medvedkin’s film-trains. Because political cinema of the 1960s denounced authorship, relied on improvisation, aimed to be a weapon for social justice and gave little attention to archiving, details about its creation are hard to come by. Thus, Grant’s study is filling an important gap in the history of both cinema and the 1960s social discontent in France. The author has unearthed and organized little-known information on some of the main actors of grassroots political cinema of the period who sought to counter the constructs of mainstream cinema. Cinéma Militant provides some typology of political cinema, references of print publications on political films, and historical context of the main film collectives,including Atelier de Recherche Cinématographique (ARC), Cinéluttes, Cinéthique, and the Groupes Medvedkine. It brings to light each collective’s specificities: “Les groupes Medvedkine associate culture and work” (119); “Cinéthique was the most theoretically rigorous”(151). It also assesses the significance of films that shaped the political mood as well as the imaginations in May 68 events, but which have become practically invisible: Oser lutter, oser vaincre (Jean-Pierre Thorn, 1968); Classe de lutte (Medvedkine Besançon, 1968); La charnière (1968). One chapter is devoted to Jean-Pierre Thorn, who was instrumental in the whole idea of collective filming; Thorn was also a main actor of the 1968 États généraux du cinéma where he presented his film on the Renault-Flins strikes, and who later abandoned cinema to work in a factory. The volume is accompanied by a selected filmography and detailed bibliography. Unfortunately, not mentioned but noteworthy nonetheless: the collective Slon/Iskra was extremely active in the Seventies and is the only one among the 1968 collectives that survived François Mitterrand’s lift of censorship on the media in 1981 and is still functioning today, almost fifty years later. Hamilton College (NY) Martine Guyot-Bender 212 FRENCH REVIEW 91.1 ...