Faces of '68

If I say 1968, everybody thinks of something different. Some think of the revolts, the street barricades, the peaceful English college gardens covered with the corpses of teachers shot dead with machine guns, where blood stains the grass trimmed with careful precision for hundreds of years, some others will think of a luxury home situated on a cliff top and now blown to pieces in an explosion, some will think of policemen lining up behind their shields at the collage campuses (and romantic souls will think of the archetypal figure of the long-haired hippie girl, sticking a flower into the gun barrel). And others will think of politics and ideology, the books and papers of the new left sold out in a matter of few minutes, the threescore of Mao-Marx-Marcuse and philosophers marching from the cool shelter of a life of science into political battles. Others again will think of the war, the Vietnamese villages bombed to pieces, the young men burning their draft calls and grandiose anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Or of love, free love and communes. Of music, storming concerts, crowds of people in the battlefields, listeners deep in mud. Or of the streets of Prague, enthusiastic citizens listening to speeches given by human-faced politicians, or of the same citizens - disillusioned, trying to convince the soldiers of a sister-nation's army in the narrow streets controlled by tanks.

If I say 1968, everybody will think of something different, - but everybody will think of something. 1968 is a symbol and a milestone, for some it is a flag and for others it is a horrible memory. 1968 is a turning point, the end of modernism and the great stories of emancipation. A completed project, surviving in fragments.

1968 is a multi-faceted phenomenon, therefore in the series organised by the Cinema Örökmozgó and held from the middle of May until the end of June, we wanted to remember the events of the time in the broadest possible sense. Because political events (students' movements, the Prague Spring), the ideological trends, (new left, wars of liberation in the Third World, emancipation movements), are just as much part of 1968 as are the phenomena of cultural and mode of life revolutions (hippies and easy riders, sexual liberation or musical and art trends from Woodstock to Velvet Underground, from happening to pop art).

1968 is an emblem, to which countless memories, images, typical events can be attached. Whether fictitious or real, the majority of these emblematic images come from films. As '68 meant something else in Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, Berkeley and Belgrade, it meant something else in films, too, from Barrandow through Cinecitta to Hollywood.

1968 and film: their relationship is unusually tight and mutual. Because film-makers, especially in France, themselves played a very important role in the events of 68', and because these events exercised a major effect on film. Not only through providing themes to politically-minded directors and producers. How excellent a topic for film 1968 is well proved by the May to June series organised at the Örökmozgó. This side of the coin (this face of 68), films like Easy Riders, Strawberry and Blood, Zabriskie Point, If..., Chinese Girl, Pacifist and Penalty Expedition are very well known to the public. Now, however, I would like to discuss that side and impact of 68 which went beyond the politics of thematic selection. Because these films of '68 are not at all alike. As the '68 experienced in Berkeley, Belgrade, Prague, Beijing or Paris was all different, thus do these films differ as well. There is either no typical film of '68, or there is at least half a dozen of them.

This other, less well known face of 1968 turns towards Latin-America. Up until today, the best era of Latin-American film - hardly at all known in this country - was the second half of the sixties. The Brazilian New Film, lead by Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos (the Hungarian audience could see a selection of his films during the recent Brazilian Film Week) came to the forefront exactly by combining political progressivity with modernistic methods. Magic realism, surrealistically prolific and associative story-telling, folklore motifs and the documentaries methods of cinema direct mix in these films. Themes discuss backwardness, helplessness, the lives and struggles of social classes living under miserable conditions. These were dark, desperate, beautiful films, with balladistic gravity and ironic comments.

Traditionally peripheral areas like Latin-America or Chine were suddenly in the flood-lights. The sixties saw not only the emancipation of Eastern-European film, but the world opened up with its drastically broader dimensions. The broad interpretation of emancipation is certainly of key importance for the purposes of the movements of the new left. This is the motif where Mao's cultural revolution, the liberation movements of the Third World, the anti-Vietnam War protestations and (especially in America) the struggles of all sorts of minorities for equality - starting with the struggle of the black population which itself was very colourful, as some groups fought for emancipation and segregation - were intertwined. This is also the time when women's movements, as well as gay and lesbic movements, have been launched all over the world. All these rather different groups and movements found themselves shoulder to shoulder with each other, if only for a limited stretch of time, under the auspices of the new left and counterculture, only to segregate again by 1970 into their very own organisations and ideologies. The micropolitics of the '70s, i.e. the chain of coexistent groups and philosophies organised for the realisation of minor causes, was the consequence of all this. (alternative life-styles, communes, take-over of empty buildings, radical feminists). Just as the terrorist movements of the same decade have been the strange, radical survival of the new leftist politics of '68. (Thus, this summer's great favourite at the Örökmozgó, the terrorist series, can be considered as the sister and the loose continuation of the 68 review. ) From among all these movements, feminism made the greatest impact not only on film-making, (countless feminist film studios, alternative news-reel groups have been set up), but also on film criticism and film theory. Not only did a great number of professional magazines committed to film-making start up at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the next decade, (Jump Cut, frauen und film), but even the path-finder of the New Wave, Cahiers du Cinéma opened the new decade with a new-leftist ideology-criticism.

"Committed film" was one of the basic assumptions of counterculture. Film making that fought for direct political and social goals, that was martially critical and meant for the widest public has been out of fashion since the '30. Alternative film-making and distributing networks were organised - circumventing the mainstream media partly by necessity, of course - all over Europe. Collective film-making was a special feature of this movement. The British Cinema Action, the Belgian Fugitive Cinema, the New York Newsreel group are all typical phenomena of the era. Perhaps the most famous French organisations were Chris Marker's SLON-group or Godard's and the groups set up by Gorin Dziga-Vertov. In 1968, French film-makers united under the leadership of Marker and Godard and developed their own alternative news network, circulating their short promotion materials on 16 mm films (ciné-tracts) all over the country.

Like in the case of so many radical attempts at renewing the language of film, Godard was a key person also in new-leftist film-making. His films made after 1968 are even more radical in breaking with story-telling and often serve the purposes of direct political propaganda. They are swarming with educating dialogues and disputes, and characters or the narrator are reading out long passages from the writings of Mao, Marx and their comrades, with the speaker facing the camera and therefore the viewer. The titles themselves say a lot: Cheerful Knowledge, East Wind, Vladimir and Rosa. Newsreel-like street scenes, inserts, quick photographic montages and cartoon-like background group-photographs mix with each other, forming a special and heterogeneous material. Godard, as he himself once said, wanted to break not only with political oppression but also with the "bourgeois concept of representation."

Yet not only the art film movement, but also the mainstream of film making was considerably more soaked in politics than it was customary before. The most successful attempt at mixing new leftist politics with commercial genres was the political thriller, becoming popular especially in France and Italy. (Francesco Rosi: Sovereign Dead, Costa-Gavras: Z, or the Anatomy of a Political Murder Case, Confession, Besieged).

1968 exercised a deep impact on films and film-makers even in countries where political stirrings were rather reserved and fragmented. Like in Hungary, for example, where in addition to films made by Jancsó and Dezső Magyar, Whistling Cobblestones or Petőfi '73 are very strong representatives of the post 68' scene. Typically in Hungary, as a form of the survival of the decisive theme of the 60s, even topical political issues were covered with historical coatings. Jancsó, e.g. connected the new left with NÉKOSZ, and Dezső Magyar in his Penalty Expedition connected the oppression prevalent in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with the terror of the establishment of the sixties. Ferenc Kardos in his Petőfi '73 made an attempt to bring the principles of 1848 to life again with the students (in 1973, however, he - chronologically speaking - got further than that, but historically speaking got only as far as 1849).

The revolution in Hungary was not in the streets. We were satisfied with its triumph on the movie screens.