For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema

Abstract

To start off, I disagree entirely with the premise: not only was 1968 filmed, considerably and well, but the period unleashed some of the most magnificent initiatives in the history of cinema in relation both to form and practical organization. For ten years at the Cinematheque Francaise I have devoted one part of my programs to the exploration of filming by Collectives, of engaged films, and all of 2008 has been dedicated to a series May 68 International (Mexico, Argentina, Japan, USA, UK, Italy . . . ), rich in discovery. period 1965-1974 is probably the most fertile and most exciting in the history of forms and cinematic propositions, a veritable aesthetic volcano. This does not make the questions you pose for the present any less pertinent, since what the most interesting contemporary cinephilia picks up in part are the critical gestures that led the revolutionary explosions of the 1960s everywhere in the world: collective work, critical examination, emergence of alternative and autonomous cultures. sites of exchange, of pirating, the blogs, in the work of some, extend the values defended by what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino had theorized under the term third essentially for what concerns counterinformation: think of the work of Indymedia. But it is necessary also to develop a cinephilic counter-information. principal battle concerns the present: the production of valuable images is such that no critic, even the indefatigable Jonathan Rosenbaum, no historian, no director of festival can take account of the cinematic production of a given time. Everywhere in the real and virtual worlds leap out propositions about the cinema, even as the history of past cinema remains largely to establish. I believe that there has never been as much work for cinephiles as today: work on the corpus of the past and present, work on the methods of observation, of collecting, of conservation, of analysis, and so on and on. We can cite several examples. In terms of corpus, an important initiative has been that of Alexis Tioseco in 2005 with the site www.criticine.com, which charts day after day the contours of cinemas of southeast Asia, beginning with the Philippines. In terms of analytic methods, one can only salute still and forever the magnificent site directed by Adrian Martin, Helen Bandis, and Grant McDonald, www.rouge.com.au, which maintains a permanent concern for the internationalization of critical paths/approaches. In terms of conservation/patrimony, the site www.ubu.com/film, specializing in the avant-gardes, represents a cinephile's dream. And then there are all the blogs, the sites of artists or individual cinephiles. I will cite only two, both exciting: that of the very independent and solitary Marcel Hanoun, who, in a unique move, has placed all his films online: www.marcel-hanoun.com; and that of the great stylist Peter Whitehead, www.nohzone.net, which is an art object in itself and presents the electronic material from which will come his next film, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. The phenomenal pimping of cinema by capitalism since its birth has formed four to six generations of spectators and we find ourselves before a Himalaya of images which constitutes without doubt the greatest modern collection of banalities.1 A generation later, no visible improvement: a certain number of poorly informed spectators believe still that Titanic (US, 1997) by James Cameron is a more important film than A Luta Continua (MZ, 1976), an amazing short film shot by Asdrubal Rebelo and Bruno Muel with the Angolan people in struggle, which amounts more or less to believing that some samples of wallpaper are more important that the writings of Arthur Rimbaud. Since the books and accounts of Guy Hennebelle, the history of cinema of armed struggles, guerrillas, and revolutionary combats is no more than just isolated initiatives, like those for example of Alain Weber2 or yours on the films of fighters in the Spanish Civil War or the Sandinistas. …