Common Revolt

Amid the endlessly scrolling light of our little machines, powered by lithium, cobalt, and other rare metals, the images of the world ending flicker by…

A pair of shoes… Masked state agents arresting a woman in the street… An old acquaintance in a swimsuit by the sea… An ASMR video of migrant deportations… An ad for a miraculous hair removal device… Dismembered children screaming in a landscape of ruins… A childhood friend’s list of little daily joys, sponsored by a cosmetics brand…

How to put it…

How's everybody doing? Are you surviving? Can you manage?

Over here,
it’s
cracking.

They say you need something like Meaning to keep going. Have you managed to find it? Between heatwaves and wildfires? When you hear that Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt et placement has invested $9.6 billion into what UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls a genocidal economy? Do you tell yourself you still need to plan your retirement, invest your savings for the future?

When the world’s absurdity spills over, when the line of the inadmissible is crossed, something turns. Something snaps, breaks. This act of refusal, curiously, is not purely negative. As Camus writes, the person who revolts says no — but does so without giving up. “It is also a person who says yes, from the very first move. [...] They stubbornly affirm that there is in them something worthwhile.”

This program begins in 1871, in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, in the aftermath of the siege of Paris and France’s capitulation to the Prussian armies. It also begins in the workshop of writer Armand Gatti, rented by Peter Watkins and his production company, to reenact the events of the Paris Commune with over 200 mostly non-professional actors. A cult film, this collective creation revisits the largest of the insurrectionary communes through revolutionary staging techniques, breaking every convention and even inviting mass media into an anachronistic coverage of the events, filmed in long takes. La Commune (Paris, 1871) gives voice to the people — workers, women, the poor, orphans, children — and actively invites the audience to reflect on their own subjugations. It’s impossible not to be caught up in the insurrectionary fever that uses the most unorthodox means to rekindle the democratic fire that inspired so many socialist, anarchist, and feminist movements.

Revolutionary social movements have almost always revive feminist struggles. One might even say in spite of themselves — as these movements often perpetuate their own machismo, offering women the clearest proof that no one will liberate them but themselves. In other words, feminist struggle is always peripheral, even within progressive movements, which is precisely why it must be carried out by and for women, without relying on the goodwill of allied groups. In Carole Roussopoulos’ Y’a qu’à pas baiser!, we remain in France, three years after the events of May ’68, amidst a feminist movement rallying around the central question of abortion rights and access. The female body — a historic battlefield — is here presented as a political subject in search of self-determination.

Let’s stay with women — half of humanity — this time to join them with the fight for civil rights. 1969, Charleston. A picturesque city, known for its historic sites, like Fort Sumter, where the first shot of the American Civil War was fired. In the spring of that year, tourists hoping to stroll past grand antebellum homes and lush gardens were met with a very different scene. Hundreds of hospital employees — mostly Black women — went on strike following a dismissal triggered by attempts to unionize. Madeline Anderson, the first African-American woman documentary filmmaker, captured this major and victorious struggle in I Am Somebody, now a landmark in the history of American independent cinema. In just 31 minutes, she powerfully embodies the concept of intersectionality from within.

One of the defining events in the history of collective protest is without question the Vietnam War. Deeply rooted in colonial history, the conflict lasted ten years, killing millions of Vietnamese — including nearly two million civilians — and tens of thousands of Americans, while sparking one of the largest anti-war movements the world has ever seen. Two films here invite reflection both on the political and social organization of protest, with The War at Home, and on the true motives behind this imperialist war, with Far from Vietnam. The former offers a detailed account of the anti-war movement in Madison, Wisconsin, serving as a real primer on collective resistance strategy. Far from Vietnam, a collaborative project involving some of Europe’s most important 1960s filmmakers (Godard, Ivens, Resnais, Marker, Varda, Klein…) remains a sharp lens through which to view today’s global conflicts dressed up in moral pretexts. Just because imperialism has changed its appearance doesn’t mean it’s any less recognizable…