In the first of a two-part look into the curatorial thinking behind the Walker’s Legacy of ’68 film series, Moving Image Program Manager Deb Girdwood looks at the year 1968 through a cinematic lens. Part one starts with the year’s youthful protests and considers the past as preface.
“There is reason to hope and to struggle if young people
continue to hold high the banner of freedom.”
—Coretta Scott King
D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop, 1968. Photo courtesy Janus Films
D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film, Monterey Pop, screened in the Walker Cinema last summer on the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking festival, kicking off our deeper exploration of the multifaceted, pivotal year of 1968 through films that brought us into intense moments of revolution, resistance, freedom, power, love, peace, and violence half a century later. We noticed that 1968 was a year that, for our intents and purposes, began with directors in rebellion over a Parisian Cinematheque.
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William Klein’s Maydays (Grands soirs et petits matins), 1968-1978. Photo courtesy Arte
William Klein’s Maydays (Grands soirs et petits matins), 1968–1978. Photo courtesy Arte
“The students who occupied the Sorbonne wanted to make a real revolution but they never got anywhere. They were in the process
of upturning their government, and they almost succeeded.”
—William Klein
In early 1968, Henri Langlois, the eccentric archivist and head of the Cinémathèque Française, and André Malraux, the officious French culture minister, got into a fight over who controlled cinema. Langlois was sacked, filmmakers and film lovers protested, and the de Gaulle government sent in the police. This cinematic protest helped enflame a growing mood of unrest in Paris. Weeks later, in May of ‘68, students protested en masse at the Sorbonne. Filmmakers were right there with them. Paris-based filmmaker and photographer William Klein was asked by students to film the events in the streets; the result was his film Maydays (1968), which we screened from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. Marching against capitalism, authoritarianism, and a conservative society, the student demonstrators united with the workers to spark a general strike, leading an explosive social and political revolution that took over the city and threatened to overturn the government.
“It’s not a matter of continuing or not continuing to watch films.
It’s a matter of cinema showing solidarity with the student
movement, and the only practical way of doing this is to
stop all the projections immediately. You’re assholes!”
—Jean-Luc Godard
In solidarity, directors including Miloš Forman and Roman Polanski withdrew their films from the Cannes Film Festival. Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Lelouch, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, and actor Geraldine Chaplin held the curtains closed and interrupted the projectionists. Godard infamously spat at a person who objected to the halting of festivities. Effectively, the filmmakers shut down Cannes. In response, the festival returned the following year with a new section, Directors’ Fortnight, founded to feature radical films, including one of the first films from Cuba following Castro’s revolution, Lucía by Humberto Solas (1968). That same year, Cuba’s most famous director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, was denied entry to the US to accept awards for his Memories of Underdevelopment, named one of the New York Times’s 10 best films of 1968. In the past 50 years, both these Cuban classics (and many others) faced extinction but were recently restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Fund and presented in the Walker’s February/March 2018 series Cinema Revolution: Cuba.
Protest sign held up in a crowd which reads “Imagination is Power” written in French. Photo courtesy The Shadow City
“Justice is indivisible and injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., University of Minnesota, St. Paul, 1967
The slogans of the French Social Revolution, especially, “Imagination is Power,” inspired the Walker’s annual Expanding the Frame series this April. Assistant Curator Ruth Hodgins and guest artist/co-curator ValérieDéus used the slogans from the protests signs carried by people who took to the streets to connect four programs—I Am A…; Be Realistic, Ask the Impossible; We Shall Overcome; and Rather Life—that mixed archival footage and experimental films, often relating messages and themes to works from other moments in time or other places with common urgency. Capturing the spirit of the times and its continuing influence, these short works resound with relevance today, using technology for documentation or alternative media to defiantly show (or incite) political and countercultural actions on a global scale, provoking change.
Imagination is Power, which sourced films from public television and city archives, opened with a 1967 speech Dr. King gave on the University of Minnesota campus; footage captured by KSTP TV and shared with us by the Minnesota Historical Society shows the Civil Rights icon addressing the intersection of our legacy of racial injustice, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. By the end of 1968, the black alternative media TV show Black Journal would feature Coretta Scott King’s Harvard graduation speech just months after her husband was assassinated. The Walker film series juxtaposed these artifacts with artistic films from recent years to show global filmmakers threading themes of unity through unrest, forecasting the political, social, and cultural issues of today.
“Showing not the past, but history in action.” —João Moreira Salles
This month’s Legacy of ’68 program was inspired by the release of João Moreira Salles’s provocative and personal cine-essay In the Intense Now, which ruminates on the impact of worldwide protests on a generation of young people. Incorporating William Klein’s documentation of the student protests from Maydays and other found footage, In The Intense Now travels between moments of violent confrontation and change in Paris, Prague, and Rio de Janeiro, complemented by home movie footage of school children marching with copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in Beijing. Disillusionment and the repressive violence that followed protests were sacrifices made to change society. Politically they often failed, but socially the movements put down roots.
David Loeb Weiss’s No Vietnamese Ever Called Me N*****, 1968. Photo courtesy Cinema Guild
As film programmers, we wanted to include what was going on in the US in the international story of 1968. As the country was reeling from the April 4, 1968 assassination of MLK, labor organizer David Loeb Weiss made a documentary, also with a title inspired by protest signs. We learned of his film, No Vietnamese Ever Called Me N*****, which has recently been restored by the Smithsonian National African American Culture and History Museum and Anthology Film Archives. Mostly a cinéma vérité–style documentary, it features a small group of black veterans speaking one month after King’s death. Hanging out in an unemployment office, the GIs have an in-depth conversation about their experiences of systemic racism in America and with the war in Vietnam. Weiss intercuts these scenes with interviews with people in the streets of Harlem during the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, the largest anti-war protest in the US. This march occurred shortly after MLK’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church, in which King called for a “radical revolution of values” and an end to racism, poverty, and war.
Amiri Baraka’s The New-Ark, 1968. Photo credit Harvard Film Archives
“But now, the Black Liberation movement had moved into a higher gear. I came back to Newark the last day of 1965. Home, a few days, then I found a house on Stirling street, just above downtown Newark, where the interior neighborhoods began to unfold. It was an old three story building, now long gone. I moved in and had it painted light green, with details of red and green, like the flag of a Black nationalist movement. It was to be a site for poetry readings, a theater, a place to hold discussions formal and otherwise and a general gathering site.
It soon became all those things.”
—Amiri Baraka
Long believed to be lost, Amiri Baraka’s 1968 documentary The New-Ark, was rediscovered in the Harvard Film Archive in 2014 and was recently restored. Commissioned by public television, Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) documented the black political and cultural consciousness raising at Spirit House, the Newark, New Jersey center he co-founded to support agitprop theater, cultural self-defense, and his wife Amina’s African Free School. Black cultural nationalism was not as sensationalist as masses of people in the streets or takeovers; its legacy includes free breakfasts for children, community health clinics, radical reeducation, and the Black Arts Movement.
Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers, 1968. Photo courtesy Janus Films
“This is neither a picnic nor a party in Oakland. It’s a political
rally organized by the Black Panthers—black activists
who are getting ready for the revolution.”
—Agnès Varda
Meanwhile, disheartened by the failure of May’s events in Paris to bring about true revolution, filmmaker Agnès Varda left France for California with her husband, director Jacques Demy. Drawn to the US counterculture, Varda drove to Oakland to film Black Panthers in 1968. Focusing on the Black Panthers’s “Free Huey” demonstrations, Varda filmed party members at the rallies and interviewed black activists, including leader Huey Newton, Minister of Defense, who described from jail how the Cuban revolution and other struggles of colonized peoples for freedom and self-determination influenced his and the party’s ideology. Varda documented Stokely Carmichael speaking against the war on black people, connecting police oppression and violence in the US to the war in Vietnam. Varda features the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, young people organizing programs to build community resources, and Kathleen Cleaver promoting black power politics and natural hair. Similarly, Swedish reporters film the Black Power Movement in Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 by Göran Olsson. Later, William Klein met Eldridge Cleaver at the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers and made a documentary portrait (Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther) of the Black Panthers’s exiled Minister of Education. These outsider portraits feature the Black Panthers addressing worldwide struggles for liberation and social justice.
Lynne Sachs’s Investigation of a Flame, 2001. Photo courtesy Canyon Cinema
“When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes. You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to
the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.”
—Harun Farocki
To show other methods of protest, we chose Lynne Sachs’s experimental documentary portrait, Investigation of a Flame (2001), and Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969). Both films demonstrate small, poetic acts of powerful civil disobedience, and both used US napalm as a weapon to protest the war. Sachs’s film recounts the actions of a group known as the Catonsville Nine, led by Minnesota-born Jesuit priest Philip Berrigan, his brother Dan, and a nun (and Philip’s wife) Liz McAlister. The nine broke into a suburban draft office on May 17, 1968, to destroy hundreds of draft cards using homemade napalm made by a fellow activist and high school physics teacher (previously, they’d destroyed draft cards with blood). Their statement declared the religious bureaucracy of the US to be “racist, an accomplice in this war, and hostile to the poor.” Farocki’s short film critiques the industrial production of chemical weapons used on Vietnamese people in the war, incorporating mass communications texts that emphasize how the US profits from the war. The pair play in the Walker’s self-select Bentson Mediatheque for the month of May.
In presenting these 1968 films to portray the protests led by what was then a new generation, we found many intersections, parallels, and connected stories of unrest and uprising around the world. In 1968, filmmakers were essential for documenting and spreading revolution just as people with cell phones are critical to spreading youth-led movements today. Viewing 1968’s activism with audiences 50 years later, we experience this cinematic history of resistance as foundational, prophetic and prologue to now.
Coming Soon: Part Two: In Summer Heat ’68, cinema heats up as filmmakers respond to define their times.
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William Klein’s Maydays (Grands soirs et petits matins), 1968-1978. Photo courtesy Arte
William Klein’s Maydays (Grands soirs et petits matins), 1968–1978. Photo courtesy Arte
