Event overview
FIVE COMMUNES
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.
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 XXth 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 XXth 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 THREE: January 27th 2012
1871 (dir. Ken McMullen, 1990, 100 min.)
Guest speaker: Ken McMullen, filmmaker
Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, is the subject of Ken McMullen’s portrait of an age in which the world itself has become spectacle. Its players, real and imagined, world historical and anonymous, are brought together through the Theatre du Ramborde, which becomes a setting for the revolutionary action of 1871 itself. And all the while the famous thesis of the Eighteenth Brumaire casts its shadow across the lives and events we encounter: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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27 Jan 2012 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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