by FilmInk Staff
This inaugural three-day event across 11 – 13 July focuses on the seismic civil unrest of May 1968 in France and especially Paris and its immediate creative shockwaves and a lasting cultural impact internationally.
The objective is to explore why and how the events of May ‘68 are relevant in contemporary times, particularly in the realms of politics, social movements, and especially its enduring cultural impact, influences and significance.
The programme will include an exhibition of rare original posters from the barricades, the launch of the new book “Synths, Sax & Situationists”, which explores the development of the French music underground from its beginnings in the aftermath of the May 1968 upheavals in France up to its maturity in the late 1970s. The programme will also include the launch of an accompanying vinyl LP compilation. Finally – and crucially – screenings of tyro Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal Sympathy for the Devil (AKA One Plus One) and a selection of rarely seen films from the Zanzibar group, the “dandies of May ’68”.
LOCATION
The Wardlow II International Centre for Moving Image. 72 Webb Street (enter via Little Gore St), Fitzroy.
DATES
The programme will be held across the weekend of 11-13 July, partnering with the popular Bastille Day events and supported by the French Embassy. Activities will take place over three days, with the book and record launches, exhibition and screenings.
ACTIVITIES will include:
> Book launch of “Synths, Sax & Situationists”
> Vinyl LP launch (x 2) of accompanying music compilation
> Film screenings
> Exhibition of original May ’68 posters from the barricades
> Discussions about the each of the programming areas
MUSIC
The near-revolution of May ’68 kicked France’s small, but vibrant counter-culture into overdrive, giving rise to a local underground music scene. This had less rock purity than the scenes in the UK and US; foregrounding improvisation, disjunction, and radical politics. “Synths, Sax & Situationists” is the first book in English that investigates this musical movement, covering 25 acts from the more familiar (Gong, Magma, Heldon) to the more obscure (Barricade, Crium Delirium, Nyl). It’s accompanied by The Roundtable’s release of the first in a series of vinyl compilations serving as an introduction to this unjustly neglected music.
POSTERS
The most enduring legacy of May 1968 are the ideas that inspired and sprang from the movement. It was probably the walls that shouted them loudest, as they were plastered with over 500 different posters in May and June. Most of these were produced by the Atelier Populaire (“The People’s Workshop”) established at the very beginning of May in the occupied École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (the national fine art school). While the iconography can be compared to American pop art, the form and function of the posters was aimed squarely at direct political action. As they themselves insisted: “The posters produced by the Atelier Populaire are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centres of conflict; in the streets and on the walls of the factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect.”
FILMS
There will be screenings of the newly restored Jean-Luc Godard / Rolling Stones collaboration Sympathy for the Devil (AKA One Plus One), made in June 1968 as the Stones were recording “Beggars Banquet”. Martin Scorsese observed, “Sympathy for the Devil: now that’s quintessential. That movie, with the vignettes that Godard intercuts with the rehearsal sessions…(a) still powerful and disturbing movie. It makes you rethink; it redefines your way of looking at life and reality and politics.”
Godard’s essential work will be accompanied by a selection of films from the “Zanzibar Group”, a French collective of filmmakers active from 1968 to 1970. This was a little-knowns chapter in the history of French cinema which existed alongside La Nouvelle Vague filmmakers but felt more akin to Andy Warhol’s The Factory. It is the work of a collective of young French filmmakers, born of the intellectual and revolutionary movement of May 1968. “The majority of their films have never been distributed, and some of them have disappeared without a trace. Others have reached mythic or cult status. They were films undertaken as renegade productions, outside the normal system.” (Sally Shafto in “The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968”).
Zanzibar selection:
Détruisez-vous, Dir: Serge Bard
Deux Fois, Dir: Jackie Raynal
Le Révélateur, Dir: Philippe Garrel
Ici et maintenant, Dir: Serge Bard
The PARIS MAY 68 REVOLT > THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES is supported by the French Embassy in Australia, the Bastille Day French Festival, Wardlow II International Centre for Moving Image, Foreign Fruits wines, Artist Film Workshop, The Roundtable, Atelier + friends.
