Besides all the talk, there’s also many scenes of the demonstrations and riots. Which of course they’d never get a chance to put into practice. His vignettes show lively discussions about just what it is that’s happening, how the students can forge a stronger connection with the workers, and what can come next - there was an opening for the imagining of potential new worlds and social systems. Klein (who contributed to Far from Vietnam) was living in Paris and renowned as he was for his spontaneous street photography he leapt at the chance to film events on the ground. Maydays (aka Grand Soirs et Petit Matins), (William Klein, 1968) Chris Marker, the overseer of the project, cut out Agnès Varda’s episode, deeming it not militant enough - an act of censorship that foreshadowed the divides (not to mention the masculine bias) within May 68. As a film made by people from varying backgrounds it also hints at the disunity of voices in France’s oppositional scene. Godard also expresses the impotent anguish of the intellectual amid the brutality of the world, but in a far more personal way. Resnais stages an actor’s cynical monologue on global politics and media that still rings true today. Among documentary footage from Vietnam and the streets of Paris and New York, the segments by Resnais and Godard stick out. The student movements of May 68 grew from the momentum of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, so this collectively-made protest-film is tapping right into the zeitgeist. Godard called ends his own film with a title card announcing the end of cinema, but for France it was an announcement of things to come.įar from Vietnam (Various directors, 1967)
But more than this, Weekend was a complete shattering of every film rule-book in existence - if May 68 would briefly give people hope that everything was possible, this film was the incendiary and liberating proof that at least in filmmaking it was. All this made the film an uncanny prophecy of the May 68 movement, predicting both its rise and demise. In Weekend, Godard was in sync with the pulse of contemporary France, showcasing it in a picaresque pop-art panorama of (among many other things) apocalyptic traffic jams, cameos by literary and historical characters, and the anarchic end of civilisation in a forest peopled by cannibalistic student-guerillas.
But there’s also disillusionment in its legacy, for the eventual failure of the students and the workers to coordinate their activities can only recall Trotsky’s words: “Even the most heroic intelligentsia is nothing without the masses.” Here are ten films encapsulating the highs and lows of this failed revolution which together, complementing and overlapping each other, provide a solid primer into May 68 and its legacy.Ī film adrift in the cosmos, a film found on a garbage heap, as it self-referentially describes itself. What happened in Paris 50 years ago this month remains one of the most discussed events in post-war French history, and has captured imaginations worldwide. The nationwide trade-union strike, the uprising of the students, De Gaulle’s government almost toppling, the whole of France in a month-long standstill, the riots, the gas grenades of the police, the overturned cars, the street’s paving stones dredged out and used as projectiles - it was as if society was about to be changed from its very bedrock up.
William Wordsworth penned these lines about July 1789 but they apply equally well to May 1968 - a time when, especially for idealistic youths angry at the repressive status quo, a wide horizon of possibilities suddenly opened up.