La Commune (Paris, 1871)

In its uncut version, Peter Watkins’s magnum opus lasts almost six hours, but I was never bored for even a minute. The English director reconstructs the brief, brutally suppressed Paris Commune government in the form of a sequence of television and radio reports directly from the scene (in the film Culloden, he similarly demonstrated what the Jacobite uprising might have looked like if television cameras had existed at that time). He proceeds on the basis of thoroughly researched historical sources, from which he also quotes extensively in the intertitles. This would have been a unique work thanks only to the (non-)actors committed to their roles (for example, members of the bourgeoisie are played by conservative party voters so that their contempt for the rebels is more authentic) and the long, fragmented shots that capture the chaos of the times while also being highly organised, but Watkins did not remain at the pseudo-documentary level. In the spirit of the Theatre of the Oppressed, the (non-)actors sometimes break the fourth wall and comment on the staged events from the perspective of their own time (1999), or rather reflect on how older and newer media contribute to the formulation of reality and the unequal distribution of power based on class and gender. The film thus also conveys communal ideas by constantly drawing attention to the fact that it is itself the work of a group of like-minded people who are striving for economic and social changes. At the same time, it is far more dynamic and less self-centred than, for example, Godard’s deconstructionist film essays of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the set is minimalist (the entire shoot took place over the course of two weeks in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Paris), at the end I had the feeling that I had a relatively good grasp of the period and the problems that the Parisian working class was facing at the time, and I also understood why comprehending them is relevant for the present. I imagine that in an ideal world, students would leave every history lesson with the same feelings. 90% (12/12/2021)

The screening of La Commune happened to come just a few days after I finished reading Sinclair's "Kerosene", the second half of which consists almost entirely of a repetitive lamentation of how unfairly and corruptly the labor movement in the US was treated in the early 20th century. So, by the time I'd sat through nearly six hours of Watkinson's pamphlet fretting over the fate of the Paris Commune, its neglect in French memory, persistent class inequalities, cultural globalization, patriarchy, ketchup that won't come out of the bottle, and so much else, I was already feeling a bit of revolutionary fatigue. Nor am I enthusiastic about the way he has the actors analyze their one-dimensional figures, whom he leads quite obviously to where he wants them to be in order to confirm his own worldview. I like its anger at the whole world and I like the LARP with the documentary crew he created with a bunch of loyalists; and then there’s the running time, which is surprisingly reasonable. But it's just a scream of anger that just has unexpected force. (10/10/2022)

Vive la commune! Ils voulaient la fusiller contre le mur, mais ils ne savaient pas que ses idées avaient depuis longtemps dépassé tous les murs, sur lesquels les balles se brisent éternellement et les horizons de tous les laquais bourgeois. La commune n'est pas morte, elle vit depuis 150 ans et vivra tant qu'une véritable liberté pour tous ne la rachètera pas. Un film qui pense par lui-même tout au long de sa création dans le but de transmettre le sens de son témoignage dans le processus même de l'expression ne peut être qu'un véritable successeur de la révolution, qui incluait tout le monde, des travailleurs aux femmes en passant par les personnes de toutes races, bien avant que les élites capitalistes (soi-disant libérales) commencent à nous prêcher à ce sujet aujourd'hui dans une forme nécessairement et largement émasculée. Un processus qui a été trop court : 72 jours / 6 heures, et pourtant il est trop long : toute l'histoire qui suit. Un film peut réécrire le passé à travers le prisme du présent, mais peut-il se transformer dans le présent à travers le prisme de l'avenir qu'il invente au fur et à mesure, s'il s'inspire véritablement de la Commune, c'est-à-dire en rassemblant les gens et non seulement en associant le scénario au tournage, l'argent du budget à la production, les désirs des producteurs à la commercialisabilité traçable? Un mode similaire de réflexion radicale sur soi-même pendant le tournage d'un film a été appliqué par exemple par le groupe Dziga Vertov autour de Godard à la fin des années 60 et au début des années 70, c'est-à-dire à l'époque où des barricades ont été érigées pour la dernière fois à Paris. (24/05/2021)