Event overview
This programme of screenings and discussions brings together films that commemorate and/or seek to re-activate the events of the Paris Commune (1871) and its political lessons.
FIVE COMMUNES
Curated by Manuel Ramos.
ABOUT
The events of the Paris Commune, the first workers’ power in history, have inspired a century of revolutionary thought (from Bakunin to Luxemburg, from Marx, Lenin, Mao to Badiou). Its constitution and its obliteration have been at the core of the main political debates of the Left throughout the 20th century. In the 1960s the Commune became the historical event privileged by militant thinkers opposing the conventions of the established Left and its fixed theories about the right revolution. For the Situationists to study the Paris Commune meant ‘to contribute to a radical critique of Stalinism and, more generally, of the bureaucratic phenomenon’. Since then, a myriad of thinkers and activists have repeatedly recuperated the Paris Commune against the absolute privilege of the Russian model of ‘successful revolution’ and for the articulation of a politics of emancipation different from Left party traditions. Since May 68, and again since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Paris Commune has become not so much the model but the key historical event for different analyses and practices re-thinking and experimenting a politics-without-Party. In a word, the lessons of the Commune have been re-interpreted in order to to re-invent the sense(s) of the political.
The cinema has been largely absent from these debates. The Commune has in fact very rarely been addressed by the cinema, it has proven a particularly complex and colossal subject with various failed projects throughout the 20th century (most notably Jean Grémillon’s). This programme brings together a few exceptions that reconstruct, evoke or address in very different socio-political circumstances what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871. These different approaches (an early French militant film, a poetical experiment, a Soviet film, a cinematic semi-comic revue and a theatrical re-enactment) develop different viewpoints and techniques, putting forward different interpretations of the episodes they address. But also, they make visible different capacities of the cinema to approach a historical event, different ways of articulating its function of preservation (a question of memory) and its powers of re-activation (a political question). The intention of these screenings is to discuss again the events of the Paris Commune in relation to our present and to contribute to re-think the capacities of the cinema to intervene in it.
SESSION TWO – January 20th 2012
Novvy Babylon [New Babylon] (dir. Leonid Trauberg and Grigori Kozintsev, 1929, 75 min.)
Guest speaker: Dr. Adrian Rifkin
The film inspired by the Paris Commune marks the climax of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's experimentations with the conventions of the Soviet silent cinema. As Prof. Adrian Rifkin has remarked: ‘its polar images of bourgeois department store and crumbling workers’ slum are the site of a class struggle to the death that represents the poor of Zola’s Paris as the heroic bedrock of Russia’s future. It re-enacts this classic episode in the history of revolutionary Paris at the inception of the first Societ five-year plan. The defeat of the Commune (…) warns against the dire conseuqences of failing to achieve the worker-peasant alliance in Russia’.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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20 Jan 2012 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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