Film Screenings / Programs / Series
COLLECTIVE EMANCIPATION: ANOTHER LOOK AT FRENCH MILITANT CINEMA [ONLINE]
July 14 – July 27
Online series – all films will be available to stream from July 14-27!
“Do we always have to follow society’s rules?” This simple question is raised in Jean-Gabriel Périot’s 2019 film OUR DEFEATS, and its challenge to consensus offers a way back to the idea of militant cinema. In France, this idea has become inseparable from the revolutionary unrest that seized the country during the 1960s, and immediately evokes the waves of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist films produced outside the industry at that time. Our series starts from this moment and heads in two directions. On the one hand, it offers English-speaking audiences a chance to engage with a small slate of newly subtitled film and video from visionary figures like Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Bruno Muel, and Carole Roussopoulos. On the other, it places these older shorts and features in dialogue with more recent efforts from contemporary filmmakers like Périot and Narimane Mari, whose work responds to and transforms the issues they raise.
The selection is divided into three programs which address central fronts in emancipatory struggles: the situation of the working class; the battle for women’s liberation; and the fight for decolonization and national independence. In each case, emancipation is envisioned as a collective process which breaks down hierarchies between social groups and defies the orders, laws, and categories holding individuals in place. Rather than consign France’s radical tradition to the past, we’ve chosen to frame it in broad terms, so that militant cinema functions as an open-ended, living category that can facilitate encounters between generations of insurgent representation.
This series has been guest-programmed by Sam Di Iorio and Zoë Halaczinsky, and is presented with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the Mellon Public Humanities Program at Hunter College. Special thanks to Valérie Mouroux & Sandrine Neveux (Cultural Services of the French Embassy); Nesrine Aitout-Le Dean & Jean Bigot (VLR Productions); Linda M. Alcoff; Arden Armbruster; Silvia Azevedo; Laurence Berbon (Tamasa Distribution); Melen Bouëtard & Paul Jullien (The Party Film Sales); Nicole Brenez; Matthieu de Laborde (ISKRA); Laetitia Donnet; Audrey Evrard; Nicole Fernandez Ferrer & Peggy Préau (Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir); Amélie Garin-Davet; Nico Israel; Florent Marcie; Narimane Mari; Bruno Muel; Michael Rothberg; and Nina Verneret.
This online series will run from July 14-27; to access each film, click on the titles below or visit this Vimeo Showcase.
PART 1: WORKERS AND STUDENTS
Streaming for free from July 14-27
Jacques Willemont, Pierre Bonneau, Liane Estiez-Willemont
RESUMPTION OF WORK AT THE WONDER FACTORY / LA REPRISE DU TRAVAIL AUX USINES WONDER
1968, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.
A single shot that, in capturing the last nine minutes of a June 1968 battery factory strike in suburban Paris, uncovers classical tragedy at the heart of observational cinema. WONDER’s impromptu portrait of betrayal and deceit crystallizes the social tensions between the May uprising’s paradigmatic figures (workers, unions, students, bosses) as well as the gender imbalance that gave rise to the feminist movement in the months that followed. It does this so perfectly, in fact, that its presentation of direct testimony seems uncannily close to scripted theater, as if the breakdown in political representation that characterizes the May events were doubled by another taking place within representation itself. It’s hard to think of a film that better encapsulates both the subversive promise of this radical moment and its bitter lessons.
Streaming for free from July 14-27
Bruno Muel
WITH THE BLOOD OF OTHERS / AVEC LE SANG DES AUTRES
1974, 52 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.
“No matter what you say about it, no matter what improvements you make, the work itself remains.” Bruno Muel’s devastating portrait of factory life in eastern France shows the political utopias of the sixties evaporating in the face of disillusionment, economic downturns, and anti-totalitarian rhetoric. Through first-person testimony and sequence after grueling sequence on a Peugeot assembly line, the film sets out a clear vision of industrial labor’s pathological impact on society as a whole. A masterpiece.
Available from July 14-27, for a streaming rental fee of $5
Jean-Gabriel Périot
OUR DEFEATS / NOS DÉFAITES
2019, 88 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
Périot’s inspired third feature invites French high school students to reenact key scenes from RESUMPTION OF WORK AT THE WONDER FACTORY, WITH THE BLOOD OF OTHERS, Godard’s LA CHINOISE and other 1960s and 70s films which deal with radical politics. These reenactments are intercut with discussions that explore what, if anything, the subjects of these scenes mean to the students now. Both a lesson in film history and a snapshot of the political present, this smart and subtle film proposes an original perspective on the contemporary state of French cinema’s radical past.
PART 2: ABORTION RIGHTS, SEX WORK, PRECARIAT FEMINISMS
Streaming for free from July 14-20 (first week only)
Carole Roussopoulos
JUST DON’T FUCK! / Y’A QU’À PAS BAISER!
1971, 17 min, video. In French with English subtitles.
Roussopoulos deftly brings together central issues in France’s nascent women’s movement in just under seventeen minutes. Insisting that feminist struggle is a struggle over representation, the video’s opening montage juxtaposes images of women in French media with shots of real people at the 1971 International Women’s March. It then underscores the movement’s practical impact, highlighting the importance of family planning services and, like Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel’s HISTOIRES D’A (1973) and Yann Le Masson’s REGARDE, ELLE A LES YEUX GRANDS OUVERTS (1982), demonstrating how safe and hygienic abortions can be performed. A landmark work in the battle for reproductive rights.
Streaming for free from July 21-27 (second week only)
Carole Roussopoulos
THE PROSTITUTES OF LYON SPEAK OUT / LES PROSTITUÉES DE LYON PARLENT
1975, 46 min, video. In French with English subtitles.
In June 1975, to protest against police harassment and social marginalization, 100 sex workers occupied the Saint Nizier church in downtown Lyon for over a week. To amplify their demands, Roussopoulos filmed video testimonies which were projected outside the church the same day, putting the women in immediate contact with onlookers. The finished work combines these testimonies with shots of the listening crowd, using the intimacy of video to fight against the dehumanization of sex workers and to emphasize that the problems they were facing were experienced by all women.
Streaming for free from July 14-27
Marcel Trillat
PRECARIAT WOMEN / FEMMES PRÉCAIRES
2005, 82 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
This sensitive and clear-eyed documentary accompanies five women at the edge of the labor market as they grapple with the compounded pressures of gender inequality and economic insecurity. Their unending work mopping, cutting, cleaning, folding, cooking, sorting, and calculating highlights the overlap of first, second, and third shifts for women, and situates the diffuse transformation of proletariat into precariat at the level of daily life. One of the key works by journalist and engaged documentarian Marcel Trillat. Although he passed away in 2020, his kindness, warmth, and generosity will not be forgotten.
PART 3: DECOLONIZATION, REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE
Available from July 14-27, for a streaming rental fee of $3
Marceline Loridan-Ivens & Jean-Pierre Sergent
ALGERIA YEAR ZERO / ALGÉRIE, ANNÉE ZÉRO
1962, 35 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.
Six months after the end of the Algerian War, Loridan, Sergent, and cameraman Bruno Muel crafted this engaged portrait of a newly-independent nation uniting around the immense task of social and economic reconstruction. Building from the emancipatory drive of anticolonial shorts like René Vautier’s ALGERIA IN FLAMES (1958) and Djamel Chanderli, Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, and Pierre Chaulet’s OUR ALGERIA (1961), their film draws together a cross-section of rural and urban voices, proposing a candid and vital image of a country in transition, marked by the scars of empire and its recent battles against OAS terrorism but fully devoted to its pursuit of a just and equitable future. These screenings, the film’s English-language premiere, are dedicated to the memory of Marceline Loridan-Ivens, and to Jean-Pierre Sergent.
Streaming for free from July 14-27
Narimane Mari
LE FORT DES FOUS
2017, 140 min, digital. In French, English, Arabic, and Greek with English subtitles.
Pushing further out from the meditation on the Algerian War in Mari’s previous feature, the amazing BLOODY BEANS (2013), this three-act experimental documentary places colonial domination within a broader frame. Moving from 19th-century colonial narratives of Algerian ‘pacification’ to the phantasmagoric collapse of an atemporal island utopia to discussions of political philosophy in present-day Greece, its lucid, expansive study of power and resistance ambitiously positions political cinema at the intersection of memory, dreams, and lived experience.
Streaming for free from July 14-27
Florent Marcie
TOMORROW TRIPOLI
2014, 180 min, digital. In English, Arabic, and French with English subtitles.
Marcie’s epic front-line account of the 2011 Libyan revolution follows an improbably loose collective of Zintanese anti-Gaddafi forces from their initial step over the barricades to a final push into the presidential compound. Navigating between immediacy and distance, this unforgettable chronicle of the eight-month insurgency underscores the chaos and complexities of national liberation struggles.
