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Saturday 17th May 2008

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From 2nd to 15th May 2008 at the French Institute

All Power to the Imagination! 1968 and Its Legacies marks the creative resistance of a remarkable year, while placing its lessons in the context of our own times. From April to June and across London, this major season explores 1968 culture, politics and thought and their legacy manifestations in cinema, visual art, literature, music and activism. Through feature films, newsreels and documentaries (by Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Philippe Garrel and Chris Marker among others), the programme at the Institut français proposes a multi-faceted portrait of that year in France and Europe (with a special emphasis of Poland and Czechoslovakia). Directors Patrick Rotman and Alain Tanner, both authors of classic '68 films texts, will travel to London to introduce their work and talk about their memories of that year.

French Films and events part of this 'May 68' Retrospective:

Saturday 3rd May:

3pm: LIP (The LIP Factor, Imagination in Power)
France | 2007 | b&w - col | 118 mins | doc | dir. Christian Rouaud | in English |
This feature-length documentary looks at the strike at the LIP works in Besançon, the most emblematic workers’ strike of the post-’68 period – an incredible struggle that lasted several years, mobilised whole crowds in France and Europe and launched numerous illegal actions without ever resorting to violence.
video screening: £5, conc. £3

6pm: Mourir à trente ans (Half a Life)
France | 1982 | col | 97 mins | doc | dir. Romain Goupil | cert. 12
Mourir à trente ans, a Camera d’or winner at Cannes, is a documentary profi le of Michel Recanati, a revolutionary whose life a Camera d’or winner at Cannes, is a documentary profi le of Michel Recanati, a revolutionary whose life ans veered from the hopes of political organisation in 1968, to despair in the following period.


8.30pm: Milou en Mai
France/Italy | 1990 | col | 107 mins | dir. Louis Malle, with Michel Piccoli, Miou-Miou, Michel Duchaussoy, Dominique Blanc | cert. 12
Madame de Vieuzac is the owner of a large property in the Bordeaux area where she lives with her son Milou. On her death, he calls on the rest of the family to attend her funeral. A bitter-sweet comedy of manners about provincial bourgeois life in May ‘68.
Another screeening will take place Sunday 11th May at 2.00pm

Sunday 4th May:

2pm: La Chinoise
France | 1967 | col | 100 mins | dir. Jean-Luc Godard, with Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Michel Sémiako, Juliet Berto | cert. PG
Godard’s brilliant dialectical farce, distinctly disquieting as well as gratingly funny, in which fi ve parisians students, members of a maoist cell, discuss the implications of the Chinese cultural revolution. La Chinoise stands as a prophetic and remarkably stands as a prophetic and remarkably acute analysis of the impulse behind the events of May ‘68.

4.30pm: Weekend
France | 1967 | col | 105 mins | dir. Jean-Luc Godard, with Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne | cert. 18
A bickering, scheming bourgeois couple leave Paris for the French countryside to claim an inheritance by nefarious means. Almost immediately, they become entangled in a cataclysmic traffi c jam, which is just the beginning of a journey fraught with violent and dangerous encounters: rape, murder, pillage and even cannibalism. Famed for its virtuoso cinematography – including a stunning ten minute tracking shot – Godard’s dystopian road movie is a ferocious attack on consumerism.

  7pm: Le Révélateur
France | 1968 | b&w | silent | 62 mins | dir. Philippe Garrel, with Bernadette Lafont, Stanislas Robiolles, Laurent Terzieff | cert. 18
One of the experimental works created from the cadre of radical, emerging artists fi nanced under the rubric of Zanzibar films that captured the spirit of May ‘68 and the counter culture revolution, Philippe Garrel’s silent fi lm Le Révélateur is a fractured is a fractured and elliptical, but instinctive, elemental, and haunting rumination on the process of awakening, maturation, psychological trauma, and transformation of childhood memory. Garrel builds a silent and quixotic defi ance against the oppressive and implacable forces of a cruel and inhuman human nature.


Wednesday 7th May:

6.30pm: Sept jours ailleurs (Seven Days Somewhere Else)
France | 1968 | b&w | 100 mins | dir. Marin Karmitz, with Jacques Higelin, Catherine Martin, Michèle Moretti | cert. 15
Known today as France’s most visible producer, distributor and exhibitor of art-house cinema, Marin Karmitz is less recognised as a key exponent of post-May ’68 cinema. His debut feature centres on a young musician who, searching for some meaning to life, spends a week with a company of dancers on tour. He has a brief affair with one of the ballerinas, but returns home to his waiting wife, child, television, profession... and a gun.

8.30pm: Coup pour coup (Blow for Blow)
France | 1972 | col | 89 mins | dir. Marin Karmitz, with Simone Aubin, Jacqueline Auzellaud | cert. 15
Coup pour coup is a fi ctional reconstruction of the successful occupation by women of a French textile factory, and a study is a fi ctional reconstruction of the successful occupation by women of a French textile factory, and a study of the general conditions of many working class women in France, and the oppression they endure both at work and at home. A collaborative and collective effort, the fi lm was written and re-enacted by the real-life striking workers (though the management ‘heavies’ are all played by actors).

Friday 9th May:

6.30pm: Génération 68: La Commune étudiante & Paroles de mai
France | 60 mins | b&w – col | doc | dirs. Hervé Hamon, Patrick Rotman, Daniel Edinger | cert. 12
Two episodes from the acclaimed French TV series, looking at the events of May and June ‘68 in Paris.
video screening: £5, conc. £4

7.45pm: Patrick Rotman in Conversation
Patrick Rotman, historian and film maker, will introduce his film '68' and discuss his latest writings and discuss his latest writings Les années 68 (Le Seuil, March 2008), and Mai 68 raconté à ceux qui ne l’ont pas vécu (Le Seuil, February 2008), co-written with his daughter Charlotte, a journalist.

8.45pm: 68
France | 2008 | 94 mins | b&w – col | doc | dir. Patrick Rotman | cert. 12
From Washington to Saigon, Rome to Mexico, Paris to Prague, a wave of protests shook the world. 68 looks back at the looks back at the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion, the Paris riots, Dubcek, Che Guevara, De Gaulle, Cohn-Bendrik and more. A dive into the chaos of a turbulent year, featuring fantastic colour footage and the music of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrisson and Bob Dylan.

Saturday 10th May:

3.15pm: La Salamandre (The Salamander)
France | 1971 | b&w | 124 mins | dir. Alain Tanner, with Bulle Ogier, Jean-Luc Bideau, Jacques Denis | cert. 12
La Salamandre is one of three films Tanner made in the seventies in collaboration with novelist, art critic and writer of polemical non fiction John Berger. A journalist recruits a novelist friend to help him write a TV script based on a news item in a local paper about a man who accused his niece of shooting and wounding him. She claimed the gun went off while he was cleaning it; eventually dropped for lack of evidence, the case was never resolved. The novelist sets out to create the script from imagination, while the journalist goes after the facts, but the truth of the incident – and of the character of the young woman (the ‘salamandre’ of the film’s title) – eludes them both.

6.15pm: Charles mort ou vif (Charles, Dead or Alive)
France | 1969 | b&w | 93 mins | dir. Alain Tanner, with François Simon, Marcel Robert | cert. 12
Tanner’s satirical social comedy examines the life of a well-to-do businessman who, on the anniversary of his company’s founding, finds himself suffering from depression and starts worrying about the workers in his factory. He leaves his comfortable life behind and shacks up with a bohemian couple and their daughter, only to find his new-found freedom under threat from his son, who tries to take over the company and have him declared insane.
Introduced by Alain Tanner

8.30pm: Jonas qui aura vingt-cinq ans en l’an 2000 (Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000)
France/Switzerland | 1976 | col | 116 mins | dir. Alain Tanner, with Jean-Luc Bideau, Myriam Boyer, Jacques Denis | cert. 12
A funny and warm polemical comedy looking at the period post May ‘68 when it was still possible to think that the radical idealism of the student protests would finally take form in the world. Eight people – an office worker, a labourer and his wife, a smallholder and his wife, a teacher, a supermarket cashier and a journalist – are drawn together in Geneva in an attempt to find an alternative way of life, beyond the grip of capitalism.
Introduced by Alain Tanner

Sunday 11th May:

4.30pm: Les Amants réguliers (Regular Lovers)
France | 2006 | b&w | 2006 | dir. Philippe Garrel, with Louis Garrel, Clotilde Dehesme | cert. 18
Philippe Garrel began as an experimental fi lmmaker in his teen years, and hurled himself body and soul into the movement of May ’68. All of his fi lms refer back implicitly or explicitly to this fl ashpoint, but here he directly represents the event — and then its melancholic aftermath, idealism lost in opium, isolation and disillusionment. Garrel regards May ’68 objectively as a failure but his own loosely autobiographical fi lm is a testament to its enduring aesthetic of poetic resistance.

6.15pm: Youth & Rebellion:
UUU, Usines Universités Union (1976 | 77 mins | b&w | various directors | in French only | cert. 12)
A collective fi lm made by students during the riots, showing the solidarity between students and the workers.
Followed by
Le Soulèvement de la jeunesse ( The Uprising of Youth) 1969 | col | doc | 28 mins, with Maurice Lemaître | cert. 12 ) 1969 | col | doc | 28 mins, with Maurice Lemaître | cert. 12 ) Youth
A rare screening of a film by Maurice Lemaitre, protégé of Isidore Isou, founder of the ‘Lettrism’ movement devoted to the anarchist ‘chiselling’ of established art forms.

Tuesday 13th May:

7.30pm: Reprise
France | 1996 | 98 mins | b&w – col | doc | dir. Hervé Le Roux
One of the monuments of contemporary documentary cinema, Reprise offers a provocative re-evaluation of the tumultuous offers a provocative re-evaluation of the tumultuous and by now mythical events in May ‘68 and their aftermath. On June 10, 1968, students from the Parisian fi lm school, IDHEC recorded the end of the strike at the Wonder Factory in Saint-Ouen. A young woman worker refused to go back to work. After director Hervé le Roux saw a photograph of her in Cahiers du Cinéma he began a long search for this ‘heroine’, a search that he began a long search for this ‘heroine’, a search that charts the changes in French radical politics over the past 30 years.

Wednesday 14th May:

6.30pm: Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat)
France | 1977 | 240 mins (in 2 parts) | b&w – col | doc | dir. Chris Marker | cert. 18
From his writings of the late 1940s to the installations of today, Marker was among the fi rst postwar multi-media creators to combine probing political essays with poetic forms of audiovisual art. Le Fond... is Chris Marker’s epic fi lm-essay on the is Chris Marker’s epic fi lm-essay on the worldwide political wars of the 60s and 70s: Vietnam, Bolivia, May ‘68, Prague, Chile, and the fate of the New Left. Released in France in 1978, and ‘re-actualized’ by the director fi fteen years later (after the fall of the Soviet Union), Marker’s fi lm takes the ‘long view’ of a brief but turbulent historical period.
Introduced by Chris Darke; interval between the two parts.


Thursday 15th May:

8.45pm: Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam)
France | 1967 | 115 mins | col | various directors: Chris Marker, William Klein, Jean Luc Godardl | screened in the original,
without English subtitles
Beginning with a graceful ballet of bomb-loading and take-off preparations aboard an American carrier, contrasted with shots of civilians in Hanoi hurrying to pathetically inadequate improvised shelters, Loin de Vietnam is a searing indictment of US involvement in Vietnam, and a fascinating document of the period.

Prices:
Single film/programme: £7, conc. £5 (except The LIP Factor £5, conc. £3 - video screening)
Double Bill: £9, conc. £7
Patrick Rotman talk + fi lm: £7, conc. £5
Triple Bill (Sunday 4 May, Saturday 10 May): £12, conc. £10

To book tickets, call 020 7073 1350