Summer Heat ’68: Fracas at the Cinema

“Great cinema makers are close to anarchists.” —Jean-Luc Godard

For our film series, Summer Heat ’68, the Walker’s Moving Image department looked back half a century to examine popular and notable arthouse films of 1968. Our aim was to showcase filmmakers who authentically responded to and represented the atmosphere and mood of a pivotal time and to make a case for the value of “looking back” as we consider 1968’s cultural and political relevance to today, viewed through a reflexive, cinematic lens.

During our research, Assistant Curator Ruth Hodgins came across a droll account of the year by former New York Times Chief Film Critic Renata Adler. In her collection of film reviews and essays, A Year in the Dark, Journal of a Film Critic 1968–69, Adler wrote, “Some of the nicest times were when events in the outside world were allowed to impinge—the strikes in Paris and Cannes, the Evelyn Waugh disturbances in Venice, meeting the Czech directors, their doubts in the spring, their absolute despair in France and Italy in the summer, meeting artists in those weeks, following them about and doing criticism of some films that mattered a bit.”¹ She was referring to 1968’s summer of cinematic rebellion, when filmmakers and revolutionaries were in constant conversation… and the whole world was watching.

Filmmaker Fracas: Then and Now

In her chapter “Fracas at the Cannes Film Festival,” Adler described how, after the Cannes Film Festival was shut down in solidarity with the uprisings throughout France, filmmakers stayed on for nearly a week to discuss how films could exist in service of revolution. There were multiple factions with many concerns, leading to a list of demands which included a system for distributing “difficult films” and a new way for new directors to make new films (presumably difficult ones). Angered by the ostentation of distributors attending the festival in their fancy attire while workers were striking, the artists demanded a change of representation and for young producer-directors to take over the system of distribution, proclaiming that films must belong to those who make them, not those who profit from them. After four days of heated debates, the group dispersed to join the riots in full bloom in Paris.² Filmmakers were through with the old-guard film elite and “establishment” movies. The film festivals that summer generated a feeling that political action was happening at the intersection of cinematic and cultural experiences.

Fifty years later, the feeling is back, as our Senior Curator Sheryl Mousley described upon her return from the Cannes Film Festival. 2018’s “fracas” at Cannes was a far more composed Women’s March led by festival jurors Cate Blanchett, Agnès Varda, Khadja Nin, and Ava DuVernay in which 82 female stars, screenwriters, directors, and producers took a stand on the red carpet to represent the 82 female directors chosen for the main competition versus the 1,688 male directors honored over the festival’s 71 years. The women stood on the stairs, locked arms, and read a statement demanding workplace safety, representation, and equal pay and status. The protest was organized by the French group 5050×2020, which seeks to achieve gender parity in the industry by 2020. Other defining events reported this year included a moment of silence to protest the Israeli Army’s killing of Palestinians on the Gaza border, 16 black actresses demonstrating against racism in the French film industry, actress Kirsten Stewart’s barefoot walk in response to an earlier year’s exposure of the festival’s discriminatory dress code requiring women to wear heels, and director Spike Lee’s censor bleep–ridden press conference denouncing “the guy in the White House,” calling upon the entire world to “wake up.”

The discourse that began during the politically and culturally heated summer of 1968 was a watershed moment when artists and revolutionaries focused on filmmaking’s role in political, cultural, and social change, establishing the ways that cinema influences how we view our world. To illustrate, we discuss four of the features in our summer series, made in exactly this revolutionary juncture in cinematic history, that still speak to where we are today: Mr. Freedom, Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One), Medium Cool, and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. In each of these films, cameras got turned around and directors flipped the script. As cinematic expressions of revolutionary idealism, they challenge audiences to ask of the medium, “What is real,” and of ourselves, “Now what?”

William Klein’s Mr. Freedom

The previous year, William Klein participated in the collectively made political film, Far from Vietnam, with Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Joris Ivens, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Lelouch, organized and edited by Chris Marker to denounce the war. Klein shot his part of the film in the US, documenting protest marches. Others incorporated footage from American bomber missions and jungle raids on the Viet Cong. Renata Adler wrote in her New York Times review, “I seriously think it is impossible for anyone concerned with facts, or words or the war to sit through it. The last thing we need now is political stereotypes in a rage.”³ Frustrated that no one saw it and exasperated by the critics, Klein wondered how to make a political film that would express his anti-war and anti-capitalism sentiments and attract audiences. In 1968, he came up with the idea of a comic-strip film to make a political film that would get seen: Mr. Freedom.

In an interview conducted by French film director Abraham Segal in 1970, Klein explained, “It’s obvious that you have to put on a mask in order to talk about politics in a commercial movie house in France or anywhere else. I put on a mask when I make this sort of film.”

Aimed squarely at American imperialism, Klein’s feature begins with sirens wailing and police attacking rioters in Chicago as the backdrop of the America he’s focusing on. A sheriff coming in from chaos in the streets pulls aside an American flag to reveal a closet full of weapons, masks, and his superhero costume. He transforms into the ludicrous Mr. Freedom, who then further destroys the world as instructed by the capitalist pigs running everything from the global corporate offices of Freedom, Inc.

It’s worth noting that when the film first screened at festivals, Marxist-Leninist groups criticized its political caricatures, especially the giant inflatable dragon representing “Red China Man.” From the same interview, Klein explains his approach to political satire and production design.

Rightly or wrongly, I used a comic-strip style. A few Marxist-Leninists have reproached me for having represented seven hundred million Chinese in the form of a dragon. They think it’s a caricature. It’s all right to caricature the enemy, but not your friends. But the basic style of the film is that of a carnival puppet show, and it would have been stacking the cards if all the characters hadn’t been carnival-like… Mister Freedom is something like a sheriff, or a James Bond. So certain film conventions are taken for granted and exaggerated to the point of being absurd. There’s a particular person behind most of the masks, or else the particular behavior of a certain country, a particular politics. Mister Freedom is all the Westmorelands, the MacArthurs, the pin-up boys of the war. Doctor Freedom represents the system and its leaders—the Trumans, the Johnsons, the Nixons, and the Kennedys. Almost all of Mister Freedom’s dialogue is made up of sentences from Rusk, Johnson, MacNamara. The ambassador is Lodge-Harriman. Moujik talks like Khrushchev. The Chinese Dragon gives out warnings like the 2000th solemn warning broadcast by Peking Information, and so on. De Gaulle is an inflated bladder. There are ministers who are pinball machines. And Mister Freedom himself is a doll, he comes unjointed, befalls to pieces.

By the time Klein was editing, the French film industry was on strike. Because there were scenes of street demonstrations in the film, the French censors thought incorrectly that it was a film about revolution in France. Mr. Freedom didn’t clear the censors and get released until 1969. Klein has since gained recognition for making “conceivably the most anti-American movie ever made,” according to American film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One)

As the uprisings in France were simmering down, Jean-Luc Godard went to London to film the bad boys of rock and roll in a studio where they were laying down tracks for “Sympathy of a Devil,” the opening song of their album Beggar’s Banquet (the same album that features their song about civil unrest, “Street Fighting Man”).

Mick Jagger said of the time in a Rolling Stone interview, “It was a very good period, 1968—there was a good feeling in the air. It was a very creative period for everyone. There was a lot going on in the theater. Marianne [Faithful] was kind of involved with it, so I would go to the theater upstairs, hang out with the young directors of the time and the young filmmakers.”

Godard captured the Rolling Stones band members at work on their Baudelaire-inspired song about the atrocities of mankind, written from the point of view of Satan. In the film, originally titled One Plus One, history is fortuitously experienced in a small detail: two days after recording started in the London studio, Bobby Kennedy was shot. As the film edits together distinct real time moments, one notices when Mick Jagger’s lyric “I shouted out who killed Kennedy” changes later to “the Kennedys” (plural).

But the film was not actually intended to be a rock and roll film at all. The opening scenes include narration about white theft of black music. The recording session reveals the repetition and mechanics behind the manufacturing of a hit, fascinating for its incongruity with the spontaneous feeling of experiencing a live rock and roll performance or even hearing the song come on the radio. Godard interspersed the Rolling Stones footage with revolutionary graffiti slogans painted in the streets and black militants in a junkyard reading from Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones, among other Situationist tableaux.

Godard’s producer retitled One Plus One to include the name of the song and changed the ending to feature the completed title track, knowing the money they’d make from music fans. At the time, Godard was furious. It’s safe to bet he’s still furious. Godard described the recut as a complete contradiction of what he was trying to do, which was to be militant himself, as an artist, and to make a critique of capitalism and a didactic contemplation on revolutionary thought.

In a 1969 Rolling Stone magazine interview with Jonathan Cott, Jean-Luc Godard clarified his intentions with the film and the role it played in the radicalization of his artistic practice.

The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that, sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film.

That’s why the scientists of the movie or of the theatre or of literature have to work on theory, to try to indicate how to found new bases, a new grammar, a new philosophy, a new mathematics out of it. And you discover how to do that by being linked to the militant people, by being yourself as militant as you can. It’s very well explained in a Mao quotation. He said: Where are the right ideas coming from? Are they coming from the sky? No. They are coming from social practice. What is social practice? There are three kinds. There is scientific experiment. There is struggle for production and there is the class struggle.

And I’ve discovered, at about the same time as the major events occurred in France, that I was working only in the field of scientific experiment, and I myself have to be related to class struggle and struggle for production, though scientific experiment is still necessary.

The same interview corroborates the story about the premiere of Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) at the London Film Festival, when Godard asked the audience at the National Theatre to walk out of the cinema and watch instead his original version of One Plus One on a makeshift screen outside. He insisted audiences demand refunds of their tickets and send the money to the Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund. When only a small number walked out, Godard denounced the filmgoers as cretins and fascists from the stage and punched his producer on his way out the door. The documentary became legendary considering how it was made and the hubbub around its presentation. Today, the British Film Institute celebrates Godard’s work as a “a one-of-a-kind avant-garde collage, a perfect time-capsule of the revolutionary end of the decade.”

This year at Cannes, Godard’s latest work, The Image Book (Le Vivre D’Image), continues to prompt political discourse among audiences and critics with his reflection on the modern Arabic world that poetically (and scientifically) poses critical questions on the current state of things. Now a recluse, instead of causing a ruckus in the festivals, Godard sends video letters and expresses his views in press conferences via Facetime from his iPhone. The jury awarded The Image Book the first Special Palme d’Or for “continually striving to define and redefine what cinema can be.”

Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool

Socially conscious documentarian Haskell Wexler would have been the last person to punch a producer. A lifelong humanitarian, Wexler fought for workers’ safety and rights in the film industry. But Wexler too was influenced by Godard, confronting and conflating political and cultural struggles in his art. In a 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Haskell revealed:

I steal a lot from Godard. He gives you courage. He tries everything. He’s a fearless, gutsy son of a bitch. He tries to get into that area between “movie” and “life” by having his actors speak directly to the camera, things like that. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the rehearsed, controlled thing seems more “real” than the real thing. I honestly don’t know what “real” is. The summer of 1968 in Chicago was the most unreal thing that ever happened.

Wexler shot his directorial debut, Medium Cool, at the same time the slogan “The whole world is watching!” originated during July’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago—you can hear real-life protesters chanting the now-famous message in the ending of the movie. Wexler’s purposeful blending of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking formally mirrored the blurred personal, political, plus moral ambiguities underlying that summer. Wexler’s fictional cameraman was appropriately caught up in American media sensationalism and confusion. Hippie idealism was souring. Love was complicated. The establishment was not trusted. What was real?

For Medium Cool, Wexler consulted with anti-war activists and collaborated with Studs Terkel, Chicagoan broadcaster and oral historian to develop an authentic story about community organizing in Chicago. A bit of autobiography is also implied, with Wexler himself an award-winning cinematographer.

Wexler tells Ebert how he was able to film his fictional story amid the real-life DNC:

At that time, nobody could have cared less. There was total confusion and everybody had a camera. There were newsreel and TV cameras everywhere. We just added one more. We waded into the crowds and nobody even noticed.

…In fact the film we made was very close to the script we took to Chicago. Of course the script didn’t specify long shots in Grant Park, or anything like that, because we couldn’t know where the trouble would happen. But there were riots in the script. We anticipated them. We knew something would happen somewhere, and we knew that our TV reporter would naturally be involved in them.

See, nothing is “real.” When you take a camera down to Michigan Ave. and point it at what’s happening, you’re still not showing “reality.” You’re showing that highly seductive area that’s in front of your camera. During that shot, you hear the chant “the whole world is watching.” But watching what? Perhaps it’s cameras watching other cameras. Perhaps TV was not showing what happened, but showing what happened on TV.

Later in his life, in a 2013 interview for the Criterion release of the film, Wexler described how he discovered that visibility (for ideas, for people) is a commodity, a condition even more heightened today. His revolutionary act was to change the equation of power and visibility using his camera. A prime example is when the fictional cameraman hears an earful from black militants (a few actors mixed with mostly non-actors procured by Terkel) in an interview about their exploitation by the media and experiences of white American hypocrisy and corruption. When Medium Cool’s climactic scenes interacted with the actual 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Wexler captured the police brutally attacking people protesting the US intervention in the Vietnam War. By the film’s conclusion, the most marginalized voices, those that had come across as most paranoid, ended up speaking the truth.

Fearing political repercussions and the police, Medium Cool opened in New York, not Chicago—further advancing Wexler’s questioning of what is real.

William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

Shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, public television launched Black Journal to report on the impact of political events and to tell stories by, for, and about African Americans on a national level, also coinciding with the release of the Kerner Report condemning racism in America. Black Journal was originally co-hosted by Harlem-born method actor turned documentary filmmaker William Greaves. After a walk-out by black staff demanding that the show be produced by an African American, Greaves got the job as executive producer. Actively engaged in the Civil Rights movement, Black Journal documented black history, leaders, community stories, and the Black Arts Movement. Winning an Emmy for his work on Black Journal, Greaves is best known for the hundreds of documentaries he produced over the course of his career.

Greaves started out as an actor at the American Negro Theater, whose graduates include Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. In his youth Greaves studied Strasberg’s “Method” at New York’s Actors Studio alongside actor Marlon Brando, who later became a Civil Rights activist and read excerpts from the Kerner Report on late-night television in 1968. Dissatisfied with roles available to black actors in 1952 and with the racist environment of the US, Greaves relocated to Canada to learn the craft of filmmaking by working his way up at National Film Board of Canada. When he returned to the states in the mid ‘60s, he reconnected with his acting friends and met avant-garde filmmaker, Shirley Clarke in New York’s underground film scene. When she saw his cinéma vérité documentary work, she connected him with producers which eventually led to his involvement with Black Journal. But, as rediscovered 35 years later, Greaves was also an artistic filmmaker.

In 1968, Greaves wrote, directed, and acted in his first feature film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which never made it to theaters in that era. In the early ‘90s, research for a Greaves retrospective unearthed the film and Sundance screened it noncompetitively as a revival in 1992, where it was noticed by Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi. The two worked with Greaves to remake a new version, 35 years later, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 ½.

Greaves called the format of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One a “film outside a film.” It is nearly impossible to describe (well), yet so satisfying when its meaning becomes clear. Greaves, playing himself as the director, tricks his crew, played by actors, by getting them to make a terrible film shot on location throughout Central Park. He films them as they both make the bad film and construct the “making of” film of it. There are scenes shot for actors’ screen tests involving a couple in a terrible mid-life argument about their sexual and marital frustrations. In the crew’s film about the making of the film (remember, they are aware that they’re also being filmed), members naturally get confused about what Greaves has intended and inevitably turn against him and the film. Grounded in Greaves’s Method Acting and influenced by tongue-in-cheek hippie comedy of its time, the experiment forced the participants to work on solutions, yet one can never tell what or who was “for real.” They analyze the script, the actors, the dialogue, and how everything would be different if everyone was liberated. Following the rule of improvisation, “Yes, and…,” Greaves asks his crew (and audience): what are you going to do with your revolution?

Lying around in the grass with his crew (actors), the director (Greaves) prompts:

The point is this: the screen test proves to be unsatisfactory from the standpoint of the actors and the director, and then what happens is that the director and the actors undertake to improvise something better than that which has been written in the screen test. This sort of palace revolt which is taking place is not dissimilar to the revolution that’s taking place, let’s say, in America today. In the sense that I represent the establishment, you know, and I’ve been trying to get you to do certain things which you’ve become in a sense disenchanted with. Now, your problem is if you come up with creative suggestions, would you make this into a better production than we now have?

Crew: I don’t understand that at all.

It doesn’t matter if you understand it, the important thing is that we surface from this production experience with something that is entirely exciting and creative as a result of our collective efforts. [he then names every person] It’s important that as a result of the totality of these efforts, we arrive at a piece of creative cinematic experience.

With its in-depth analysis of reflexivity, revolution, and multiple levels of reality; incorporation of split-screen images; a Miles Davis score; and heated psychological conversations about sex, Greaves’s film is now regarded a long-lost gem of the American New Wave and an improvisational new spin on cinéma vérité.

Cinematic Style Politics

In one of her loose rants of the day on 1968’s “Style Politics,” Renata Adler wrote after viewing Godard’s La Chinoise, “One of the things democracy may be the system least equipped to deal with is revolution as an aesthetic exercise… Neither art nor politics can be sustained forever as an orgy.”⁴ Not long afterwards, in 1970, Tom Wolfe wrote his caustic piece for New York magazine, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” calling out celebrities and artists for coopting revolutionary causes at a fancy Black Panthers fundraising party hosted by Leonard Bernstein. His essay coined the phrase describing famous people utilizing political alliances for social capital, as fashion-statements or, to use today’s lingo, as “brand.”

As we sifted through accounts of the making of these four films during the summer of 1968, using Adler’s reviews to consider how they were received, and considered their relevance in light of Wolfe’s valid critique of what happened when these conversations hit the parties, questions rose to the surface: Is it truly possible to join the revolution and profit as an artist? As an arts institution? How can filmmakers rebel from within a system that institutionalizes the oppression they seek to destroy? What happens when revolutionary idealism is exploited by culture as fashionable, sparks a trend?

As Wolfe pointed out, flirtation of revolutionary idealism with radical chic can be dangerous to a cause when political ideas are appropriated as genre or style or when the message loses its power because it’s delivered by a messenger least impacted by the issues. And yet cinema continues to be utilized by filmmakers as a revolutionary tool for change. Demonstrations continue to garner worldwide attention at film festivals. Camera crews still take it to the streets to document uprisings. When directors show us a reflexive reality, audiences become aware of filmmaking as a process rather than a product and engage less as consumers, more as participants. The cinema further challenges our understanding of our reality by blending fiction and nonfiction. Spike Lee’s incorporation of footage of Heather Heyer’s murder during Charlottesville’s white nationalist march last summer connects today’s reality to past atrocities in his fictional BlacKkKlansmen, which received a six-minute standing ovation and the Grand Prix award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. As intended by the artists, audiences are prompted to fundamental discourse when paradigms shift in the cinema, hopefully inspired in some way to change. New realities and new ways of examining our understanding of reality are burned into our collective consciousness as we sit in the dark and view their projections on screen together, proving that perhaps the most dangerous, most effective idea in Cinema continues to be the idea that, “the whole world is watching.”

Notes

¹Renata Adler, “Introduction,” A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic, 1968–1969 (New York: Random House, 1969), xxii.
²Renata Adler, “Fracas at the Cannes Film Festival,” A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic, 1968-1969 (New York: Random House, 1969), 152–155.
³“More Festival at Venice,” A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic, 1968–1969 (New York: Random House, 1969), 232–234.
⁴Renata Adler, “Very Far from Vietnam,” A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic, 1968-1969 (New York: Random House, 1969), 164–165.

 

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