This is footage from an amateur film,
made in Czechoslovakia, in 1968.
I don't know who these people are.
All I know is what the images show.
I know that they're happy.
I imagine that the person filming is, too.
I know that the people are wearing lightweight clothing,
in a country where it's cold.
So it must be spring or summer.
Summer 1968 in Czechoslovakia,
and these people are happy.
Brazil, around the same time, footage of another family I don't know.
The camera thinks that it's only recording a child's first steps.
Inadvertently, it also captures class relations in Brazil.
When the girl moves forward, the nanny moves back.
She is not a part of the family
and, probably without being asked to,
she steps into the background, where she melts into the passersby.
We don't always know what we're filming.
The person who may have filmed this footage
said this, in the first line of the account she wrote:
“We arrived at night,
for what would be the most difficult and fascinating journey of my life.
As we got off the plane, we had our first contact with the Red Guard,
which formed a guard of honor for us.
Immediately, we were given the Thoughts of Chairman Mao
and all sorts of propaganda literature,
along with a red ribbon, ensuring us treatment as first-class tourists.
At night, after dinner, we went out for a stroll by the sea.
We were immediately surrounded by the Red Guard,
which applauded us.
On the way, we once again saw groups of young girls reading Mao's Thoughts.
We were struck by this, as they evidently did so quite naturally and happily.”
Unlike the scenes of Czechoslovakia and Brazil,
I know who might have shot this footage
and I recognize these words.
They were written by my mother,
and they describe her trip to China in October of 1966.
She was 37 years old at the time.
Since she rarely appears,
I imagine she may have filmed many of these scenes.
This is amateur footage.
It wasn't shot to become part of history.
These are just leftovers from a moment of life.
I discovered them by chance, 40 years after they were shot.
My mother was traveling with friends,
a group of businessmen, bankers and society figures,
on a paid trip organized by a French art magazine.
They were dilettantes in search of the beauties of the country.
My mother tried to go to the Forbidden City, but she found the gates closed.
"The Cultural Revolution of the dispossessed will be eternal",
she saw on the facade, without realizing it.
She had gone to see one thing and wound up seeing another;
not the past, but history in action.
IN THE INTENSE NOW
Back to the Factory
My family had lived in Paris since 1964.
We'd go back to Brazil on vacation.
In my memory, France was dark and Brazil was luminous.
Here, there were animals and sunlight;
there, heavy doors led to dark courtyards
where a concièrge chain-smoked.
I was happy on vacation.
In my memory, my mother was happy all year round.
My mother kept images of China, where she went as a tourist.
Of France, where we lived, I have no images.
This is a scene from May 1st in Saint-Nazaire,
a 1967 film about the strike at the city's shipyards.
The man speaking is a labor leader.
People who were just watching a work stoppage,
went on strike for two months.
They saw that there was plenty of stuff
that they'd thought was indispensable
and that they could live without missing those things,
that all that stuff wasn't essential.
What was essential was their dignity,
being real men and not mere consumers.
Not just being people who exist, but people who live.
During our sixty-day strike,
that was the fundamental experience.
The fact that many men proved themselves,
and that those two months in 1967 will mark their lives, will leave memories,
whereas 1966 or 1965 is daily life and nothing more,
with nothing to remember.
December 31st, 1967.
Speech by General de Gaulle President of the Republic
Frenchwomen, Frenchmen!
With all my heart, I wish France a happy New Year.
What does 1968 have in store?
The future is not the province of men,
and I will not predict it.
In the political realm, our institutions will be diligent,
so that there will be no way for us to be paralyzed by crises
such as those which brought us so much suffering in the past.
On the contrary, it is to be expected
that with the ardor of renewal following its course,
and its champions, principally young people, doing their part,
support for our Republic will only grow broader and more vigorous.
This is the active, peaceful outlook that 1968 seems to offer the Nation.
May all of you, and I as well,
be able to bring it to fruition
so that the year will be a good one
and one worthy of France.
Vive la République! Vive la France!
It really is difficult to predict the future.
The first photogram of This is Just the Start,
by a collective of film professors and students.
It was screened in mid-May 1968.
The directors were in a hurry, and the film doesn't waste time with opening credits.
It starts like this, straight out.
Paris, Thursday, May 2nd.
The government executes a lockout at Nanterre University.
On Friday, May 3rd, they set the police on the students.
The Sorbonne is invaded, and the students are arrested.
Spontaneously, their fellows mobilize.
Massive police reinforcements converge on the capital.
On the terrain chosen by those in power,
a battle is waged, and they will lose the political initiative.
organized and archaic, the French bourgeoisie
is part of the international bourgeoisie...
we will not accept that bourgeoisie.
We must start to think in terms of all possible means,
and to put these means into practice...
Everything is decided on the streets now.
The final struggle is beginning
The revenge of all those who died of hunger
The revolution is beginning
And will be victorious tomorrow!
Beware! Beware! Of the Young Guard!
The streets, the break with traditional political organizations,
the collective singing, all this is important.
But so is this: these two closeups,
the first closeups of the first film of May.
In the first, you can read: Smile.
In the other: Only the Revolution can free us from the dead weight of the past.
Soon, someone would graffiti on the streets of Paris:
“Happiness is a new idea.”
And also: “We want to live.”
In Nanterre, the students, in their fight against repression at the university,
are a perfect model of the struggle.
Six months of friction with the authorities culminate, on March 22nd, '68,
with the occupation of the university's administrative offices by the students.
This gesture is a symbolic break in their relationship with authority.
Podiums are stormed, in a critique of the student/teacher relationship.
Rewatching the scene in Nanterre, I see how revealing it is.
The authority up on high, the students below.
On the left, a young man pointing a finger.
It is May, and now it is the teacher's turn to fall silent.
It's also telling that the film doesn't name the young man.
By then everyone knew him.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
The idea of a leaderless movement was a beautiful one.
It is May 6th.
The movement had begun as a backlash against a reactionary university
which insisted on legislating about dating and sex.
Now it was becoming something else.
On that day, the troops were ordered
not to react to the students protesting the arrests of their fellows
and the occupation of the Sorbonne.
Hours later, the troops descended with fury.
Free our comrades! Free our comrades!
On the 10th, the students took to the streets around the university.
These aren't barricades from which to attack the police,
these are barricades to protect the collective discussions
taking place on the streets.
Join the barricades!
We're no longer mere spectators, you all are political militants now.
This is Cohn-Bendit speaking.
The only advice we can give you is don't erect barricades just anywhere.
Put them up at strategic points where you can defend yourselves
when you hold your committees on political action and discussion.
I'm seeing fire on another barricade...
...and now the barricades are in flames...
That's all for now!
Listen up, I'm coming from the first barricade.
Right now, the police are tossing gas grenades,
chlorine, everything they've got.
That means that since the protesters have no way to retreat,
either the police stop, or it'll be worse than the massacre at Charonne.
My eyes are really burning.
The target of the explosions...
you just heard another one, and now a third,
they seem to be spreading across the barricade now
while the police are using tear gas, forcing the students to retreat.
We're being forced to retreat as well...
Radio was the great medium of May, and, that night, Cohn-Bendit took it over.
Given the brutality of the police, I'm asking all protesters to leave the Quartier Latin.
There's no need for rear-guard skirmishes.
Those in power have tried to strike a hard blow at the student movement.
They didn't disband a protest.
They attacked it violently, as if a civil war were going on.
And so I ask that all the unions, all the left-wing parties of the opposition,
begin a general strike starting this Monday,
to demonstrate their solidarity with the students and the working youth.
Let's go back to the problem of the students.
Claude Couband, please introduce tonight's guests to our viewers.
Over to you.
May 16th.
Five days after taking over radio,
Cohn-Bendit took over television.
We're live.
To my right are the three leaders, bosses, spokesmen...
I don't know how to define you all. The Three Musketeers, who knows,
and, for some, the three rabble-rousers behind the workers' unrest.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, from the March 22nd Movement,
Jacques Sauvageot, vice-president of the National Student Union,
and Alain Geismar, secretary-general of the National Union of Higher Education.
OK, we'll explain it, since you all want to understand.
First issue. We always saw the exams as a process of social selection.
That is, everyone knows, and I'm not being a high priest
when I say that there are scarcely any children of workers in universities,
and that far fewer come in than go out, etc.
For us, and today in Nanterre...
After eleven minutes, Cohn-Bendit had already stolen the scene.
No young person had ever spoken to authority figures this way.
This was new, and the cameras soon realized it.
Pardon me, sir,
but after all, you're saying before millions of viewers
that we're going to harm whoever gets in our way.
And I can respond that French universities
have been harming the workers for 20 years,
because they're not there, and that is truly a problem.
The government's been in power for ten years.
In those ten years, they might have looked for a solution.
They didn't.
Meanwhile, we've been fighting for ten days,
and we've been looking for three days now.
Between ten days, ten years, and three days,
give us some time to think, and don't be so hasty.
Clearly, we are calling for the end of this political regime.
We call for General de Gaulle to resign.
We call, above all, for the end of this police state
that allowed for the use, in Paris,
of weaponized gases that are used in Vietnam.
That's clear.
You've already said that.
Well, I'm repeating it, since the question was asked.
But you speak of transformation, transforming universities,
transforming society, destroying the regime... Transform it into what?
Because people must be given a choice between what they have and something else.
You give them a choice between what they have and nothing.
- Are you a student of history, Mr. Charpy? - Yes, of course.
Well, then, have you ever seen, in history,
transformations where the model for what was to come was already present?
Yes. The Russian Revolution of 1917.
I think they had quite a precise model...
You're wrong, and you might do well to reread Marx,
because there's not a word there about the society to come.
There's a critique of capitalist society,
but not a word about the future...
So go read Lenin...
Cohn-Bendit wrote:
“As the show went on, the technicians behind the cameras went wild.
We said plenty of things, giving the impression that we were thinkers.
I did plenty of theater in school.
That's all you need to understand me in '68.
Television is a theater, and I was able to play myself on a massive stage.
It was a great moment of my youth.”
He wrote:
“Having an antiauthoritarian identity means introducing pleasure into everyday life.”
He might have added: and joy, and happiness as well.
He appears here, in what may be the most famous photograph of May 1968.
It was taken outside the Sorbonne on the 6th.
He had just sung the International to a riot policeman.
Cohn-Bendit once said that the most powerful
anti-Communist weapon was the sadness of East Berlin.
Each second took on the density of eternity,
a student later wrote about those days.
I hope that my mother felt something of that.
I think that in China, she came close.
The Italian writer Alberto Moravia went to China a few months after my mother.
This is what he wrote, arriving from Hong Kong:
"We realized that we were not entering a new country, but a new state of things.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution has the consistency of a reality that,
before it is offered to the mind, is imposed on the senses.”
It was this new state of things
that my mother was forced to grapple with when she arrived there.
She and the country were polar opposites.
I've always wanted to know what happens when opposites come together.
My mother answered that question with the account that she wrote.
Moravia said that poverty was what most drew his attention in China.
Poverty that he described not as penury, but as an absence of wealth.
And he observed:
"All are poor and they have what they need to live,
which is man's normal condition.
The face of poverty is decent, proud, and implacable."
My mother was struck by the noise and the red.
Too much noise, with the loudspeakers blaring the thoughts of Mao;
and too much red, on the flags and the banners carried by the teenage Red Guards.
Like Moravia, my mother identified the religious roots of these manifestations,
and, like Moravia, she was reminded of Holy Week processions in parts of Europe.
She wrote:
“What is truly impressive is the devotion with which the living God Mao Zedong
is carried by the idle crowd during interminable parades.
An air of mysticism one only sees in certain cities in Spain during the Passion Week.”
When she saw a group of children practicing a revolutionary ballet,
she made no mention of the plot or the propaganda.
She preferred to describe their hands, which she called the loveliest on earth.
She saw beauty in the slenderness of their fingers,
the effortless way they moved,
and saw the children's gestures as inspired
not by some military choreography,
but the poses of antique Chinese porcelain figurines.
As the journey goes on,
her first impressions of the Cultural Revolution are left by the wayside.
Something else begins to emerge, which, for lack of a better word,
I'll call enchantment.
The scenes of crowds hypnotized by the figure of Mao,
so characteristic of records of the period,
begin to vanish from the material,
giving way to landscapes, lakes, objects.
My mother, open to the beauty of the world.
May in Paris.
From the archive of gestures of '68, this is the most striking.
The body bent backwards, the arm as a slingshot,
the pent-up energy, a second away from being released.
The Olympic athlete's turn.
And, almost always, the retreat.
I don't remember the city like this.
For some, this destruction was the price to be paid to topple a decrepit order.
For others it was the opposite,
a threat to the natural state of things,
to a France which had always been ruled
by a white, Catholic, conservative upper crust,
educated at all the same exclusive schools,
zealously guarding its privileges and looking askance at any novelties.
Laurent Joffrin, the author of one of the best histories of the period,
said that in May, everyday life changed.
He wrote:
“Women don't want to go back home, homosexuals don't want to hide anymore,
workers no longer feel obliged to doff their caps when they pass a foreman.”
May Days
Pieces of a film that ought to have existed...
This simply means that the France of 1968 is not the Petrograd of 1917,
that it's much more politicized, that the mass media
open up utterly new chains of communication with the masses.
Lenin didn't have the radio or live reporting in the field...
May Days, by the American photographer and director William Klein.
It's the best record of how the French started speaking out in May.
Those who had lived in silence
now felt able to have their say.
Students, workers, waiters.
They're always the same, directed by technocrats and intellectuals.
Those with only basic schooling are always left out.
That's not true!
Of course it is!
The proof is that 80% of the people here are intellectuals.
I only have a basic education, I'll never get to the top.
But I'm not pitiful!
I'm a waiter, I'm a maître'd.
After a 12-hour workday, you think we're going to class at the Sorbonne?
No! It's not true!
That didn't keep me from joining the Communist Party in Orly.
I'll admit it in front of you all. But it was only for a short while.
But I also might ask: why was that?
Because they had a Youth House and I felt like doing something.
Even though I made 300,000 francs per month.
Well, the truth is that I didn't do anything.
Forgive me for getting emotional, but that's just the way things are in France.
That's all.
Sartre in the amphitheater of the Sorbonne.
The photo is telling.
The greatest French intellectual of the period now listens.
Before thousands of students, this is how he opened up the conversation:
“It seems that you are fed up with master classes.
I couldn't agree more.”
Take a look at the student on the left.
They say it was so good to be alive and aware in those days
that nobody wanted to sleep.
The fact that someone decided to get some rest
while the old philosopher spoke says plenty about how the great masters
were seen during those great weeks of May in Paris.
The magazine Nouvel Observateur brought Sartre and Cohn-Bendit together,
with their roles switched.
The philosopher asked the questions and the student answered them.
Cohn-Bendit said that he felt as though he were on top of the world:
“For me, May of '68 made a lot of my dreams come true.
Who wouldn't dream of being interviewed by Sartre?”
Sartre found it strange that the students had no clear project.
“What many people cannot understand
is the fact that you have not tried to work out a program.
They attack you for trying to smash everything
without knowing what to put in its place.”
Cohn-Bendit, age 23,
who had begun the interview by saying that he wasn't interested
in finding a formula for carrying out revolution,
answered:
“Our movement's strength is precisely that it is based on an uncontrollable spontaneity.
Programs are paralyzing.
The movement's only chance is the disorder that lets men speak freely.
What matters is not working out a reform of capitalist society,
but launching an experiment that completely breaks with that society,
an experiment that will not last,
but which allows a glimpse of a possibility:
something which is revealed fleetingly and then vanishes.
But that is enough to prove that that something could exist.”
Watching the images of those weeks, at several points you might almost say:
this is the high point of these young people's lives.
They may never be this happy again.
It's true. He went to the protest at Boulevard St. Michel.
But he'll be back later, ma'am.
Listen, ma'am...
Do you want me to come talk with you? Well, I don't know...
Yes, I can guarantee that he's alive.
I've been here for two days and he's fine.
No connection.
Phone your sister?
Stay calm, I can assure you that he's fine.
For tonight's protest we put together a security service.
Yes, we'll be careful.
Listen, we're fighting to express our ideas,
it doesn't matter whether they're pure or not.
It's David's mother. He hasn't been home in a week.
Everything's fine.
If something goes wrong, call me and I'll ease your mind.
How's that?
Don't mind the television...
Tell her they're all sell-outs.
They're asking me to tell you that on TV they're all sell-outs!
Soon we'll occupy TV as well.
Quiet.
She's really sweet.
We don't use the tricolor, we use the red flag.
The black one! Not the red one!
There are, around the Luxembourg...
There are thousands of riot police, civil police, and soldiers.
Did my mother recognize the joy of the streets?
Two years earlier, her face had been as radiant as theirs.
Now, what had won out:
curiosity to see things up close,
which had always been a trait of hers,
or the prudence of these people watching from on high?
By mid-May, the country had come to a stop.
Six million workers were striking
in opposition to the government and in solidarity with the students.
This was a France with no time clocks, no routine,
no productivity quotas, and no bosses.
All that energy might suggest the imminence of revolution.
But no.
May 7th.
The day after a clash with the riot police, the Paris chief of police
had a telephone installed in the headquarters of the student leadership.
Every day during May, the rebels and the repression
were in direct contact to keep blood from being spilled.
Nobody was ready to kill, much less die.
The children of the bourgeoisie and the government were among the students.
The Minister of Justice alone had three out on the barricades.
On that same afternoon, on May 7th,
50,000 students marched through Paris.
They went by Parliament, protected by a handful of police officers,
and none of them thought of storming it.
They went by the presidential palace, and nobody noticed.
Some spoke of a lack of ambition.
Cohn-Bendit replied that, unlike in 1917,
by 1968 the State no longer had a center.
It was everywhere.
Storming palaces no longer made any sense.
Years later, Cohn-Bendit suggested that we pay attention to their hair.
He wrote:
“What stands out, when we look at films or photos of May '68,
is a conservative, 50s-era touch:
everyone has short hair.”
Cohn-Bendit saw the U.S. student movement
as far more radical and libertarian than the French.
For example: in Paris, the leaders are all men.
In all the discussions, assemblies, and meetings,
women listen more than they speak.
May was essentially masculine,
and in this respect it mirrored power relations in society.
And there are the blacks.
Those who appear in the hours and hours of archive material,
even those among the students, are always at the edge of the frame,
invariably silent and almost always in suits.
They are never protagonists, nor even supporting actors,
but extras who do their best to not stand out.
A Canadian journalist wrote:
“During the troubles, I saw fewer blacks and North Africans.
They were keeping very quiet.
Now they emerge, still quiet, sweeping the streets.
Nothing changed.”
The government's been in power for ten years.
In those ten years, they might have looked for a solution.
Cohn-Bendit seems to have understood
the dead ends of May before everyone else.
Soon after that interview, during the second half of May,
while the streets were still ablaze, he left for Berlin,
where he had attended his first political protest the year before.
Back then he was an anonymous student. Now he returned as a hero.
He wrote:
“I returned out of pride, but it was also an escape,
since I didn't really know how to go on.”
The problem with the trip was money, which he didn't have.
The magazine Paris Match found out and made him an offer:
if he let a photographer go with him, they'd give him the car.
Cohn-Bendit accepted.
Later, he wrote:
“The guy photographed me the whole time, and I agreed to everything.
Being photographed with my suitcase in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
It was crazy to accept having a photographer with me for 4 days
just to pay for my trip.
I was tamed by glory.
All I did was speak in public, go on TV.
I became a talking machine with no more strength left in me.
I became a starlet,
with all the implications that has in a society of the spectacle.
My character got away from me”,
he said, all before he turned 30.
The caption reads:
“And now he sets off to preach anarchy across Europe.”
That was false.
History has no record of revolutions spread by anarchists
financed by middle-class magazines.
This was rebellion being appropriated by commerce, the start of the process.
Cohn-Bendit and May of 1968 were now goods with market value.
Everything - even the experience of revolt - can be bought and sold.
As for the elections:
"We're not going to sell out the strike in exchange for a vote.”
That's a quote from Cohn-Bendit.
On the intoxicating powers of the radio: "Radio poisons, strikes purify."
On fascist Gaullism: "De Gaulle is violence, you are power.”
To the workers: "Be realistic, demand the impossible.”
At the Sorbonne, the so-called liaison committee of students and writers
meets to put potential slogans through a collective filter.
Many will be repeated in the marches to come.
Some will be remembered as part of the great creative outpouring of '68.
Several would be taken up in advertising.
"Radio is the poison, strikes are the cure.”
I don't know how we can...
Strikes are essentially opposed to anything associated with the government, with poison.
To the extent that radio...
Radio's doing the poisoning.
The beautiful words of May on the walls of Paris.
“Life is elsewhere.”
“Hide yourself, object.”
“Enough with acts, we want words!”
“Man makes love to the Thing.”
“Careful with your ears, they have walls”.
“The walls have the floor.”
“Professors, you make us grow old.”
“Workers of the world, have fun.”
“Society is a carnivorous flower.”
“I have something to say, but I don't know what.”
“Tell me you love me with paving-stones.”
“Already ten days of happiness.”
“I came, I saw, I believed.”
This last one at the Sorbonne,
nearby: “Godard, the biggest jerk of all the pro-Chinese Swiss.”
My mother and her friends
try to peek inside a temple closed off by the Red Guard.
Next to her, the posters say: “Salutations to the young warriors
who protect the cultural relics of the temple of Ling Yin.”
During the trip, she went by dozens of these revolutionary posters and slogans.
Many must have been translated for her.
In her account of the journey, she ignored them all.
Like this one, on this building:
"Education serves the classless."
Or:
"The heroic people of Vietnam will win and the vile Americans will be defeated",
on the facade of the school.
"All the peoples of the world unite to defeat the Americans
and the dogs that join them", shortly after she and her friends,
at least one of them an American, arrived in Shanghai.
"We will smash the skulls of the dogs who oppose President Mao",
in Tienanmen Square.
"The entire world celebrates the launch of our missile
and the Americans quake in fear."
"The Soviet Union will be driven mad by rage and envy",
on Anti-Revisionist Street, in Beijing.
"Never forget the class struggle",
on the Summer Palace, also in Beijing.
She preferred to talk about the young people she saw on the street.
She wrote:
“Next to the fantastic quality of Chinese skin,
the famous English complexion is a joke.”
And she said some funny things:
“Of the population of 700 million, I think 500 work incessantly
and 200 million just stroll around.”
My mother's encounter with China is a series of surprises.
There is more praise than criticism.
She complained about the timbre of their voices,
which reminded her of meowing,
about the sculptures, which she thought were mediocre,
about the hydrogen bomb,
and about the stewardess who, on the flight from Beijing to Guangzhou,
handed out mimeographed pages in French
and demanded that they all sing the Maoist hymn The Great Helmsman,
which my mother sang, and then, in the only act of political resistance in her life,
started a chorus of the French lullaby Au Clair de la Lune.
She praised the carvings -
"the Chinese are extraordinary carvers", she said -
and the bronze sculptures,
which she found “more moving than any Greek vase.”
She praised the end of hunger in China,
the provision of supplies, the eradication of opium,
the enrichment of the land, the gardens and the lakes.
She thought the bridges lovelier than Palladio's,
and she loved Guangzhou,
where men strolled in shirtsleeves in the shade of the palm trees
for no other reason than the pleasure of walking,
which she saw as proof that no authoritarian regime can hold up under the heat.
She visited cities and villages, went to the countryside
and saw archaeological sites in a journey of just a month.
She was touched by what she saw.
She wrote:
“At night we returned to Wang Che to see the moon.
In the massive courtyards we separated,
and each demanded a pavilion of their own.
We were then transfixed by a phantasmagorical effect;
from any point we looked, through the orifices carved into the stones,
we saw the moon.
No-one wanted to break the spell.
It was almost painful to return to the company of others.”
In the Great Wall, its elongated form stretching away across the horizon,
the Italian writer Moravia saw the serpentine vitality of a reptile.
For my mother, it was “of all the journeys I've taken around the world,
my most unforgettable memory.”
She wrote about “its silhouette slinking along like a lazy river,
in an extraordinary array of grey and brown stones...”
Her description is more placid and less dangerous than Moravia's,
a river instead of an animal,
more a paean to permanence and slowness
than to change or a swift strike.
With Moravia there is politics;
with my mother, there is none.
Beauty lives off on its own, far away from the theater of men.
“Power to the workers.” Not on the walls of the Sorbonne,
but at the entrance to an aerospace factory.
“Power to the workers” is a revolutionary slogan.
“Enough with acts, we want words,” is not.
Someone wrote that the verbal inventions of '68
owe less to Marx and more to the surrealists.
It was as if everything were possible in May of '68
except actually taking power.
The film The Right to Speak shows students walking towards the factories.
A generous impulse spurred them on: they were going to show their solidarity
with the striking workers, nearly six million strong by mid-May.
Comrades?
Comrades, just as many students have come here,
and many other students are still to come,
we also wish to say that the doors of the universities are open to the workers.
They must be, so that we can undertake struggles
that will be ever-stronger and ever-larger,
where society can be transformed by the workers, and for them.
The leader of a Trotskyist group, Alain Krivine, who is applauding here,
wrote in his memoirs:
“From the windows, the workers watched us pass with suspicion,
under a heavy silence.”
It was a terrible mismatch.
Take this conversation.
Here are the students.
And here are the Citroen workers.
What stands out the most is not the sincere will to communicate,
but the fact that these conversations were not conducted on the same level,
between equals, free of suspicion.
We cannot give in to intimidation tactics.
They declared a state of emergency...
It can't last, that can't be.
What the students do not want is to become the bosses in a bourgeois society.
Becoming squares, pricks...
They don't want to be the pricks who protest at age 18
and become head of the firm at age 25.
And fuck the workers.
That's why there's all this mayhem in the universities.
That's what students are fighting against.
There is only one aim: to do away with the bosses.
That's the last word.
That's the first word.
From here on out, it all begins, life'll get great.
When there are no more bosses bringing us down.
Bosses have got no business here.
Workers who gave interviews during those days
continued to refer to the students as “our future bosses.”
Unease aside, the simple fact that these conversations took place
alarmed the Communist Party and union leadership.
Both would strike deals with the government even before May was out.
The union leader.
The Minister of Education.
The Prime Minister.
“Our Cultural Revolution wound up in a sordid negotiation
over wage adjustment indexes,” someone said.
The May of bureaucracy would win out.
Few imagined that, days after this photograph,
in the last week of May,
the government would regain control of the situation.
It happened like this:
on the 24th, with the country paralyzed by strikes,
de Gaulle went on television.
Everyone, evidently, is aware
of the scope of recent events,
both in the universities and in society.
In them, we see all the signs
that show the need for a modification in our society.
The general asks for order and promises reforms.
France sees his face.
He is old and tired.
De Gaulle seems not to understand the seriousness of the moment.
He doesn't get to the point.
I have decided to submit to the vote of the Nation
a bill in which I request that they give the State,
starting with its head, a mandate.
De Gaulle to the gallows!
“I missed the mark”, de Gaulle would confide to an ally after the broadcast.
The night of the 24th was the most violent of all of May.
Six days later, on May 30th, De Gaulle was back on the air.
But now, only on the radio.
Frenchwomen, Frenchmen,
as the bearer of the legitimacy of the nation and the Republic,
I have over the past 24 hours considered every single eventuality
that would allow me to preserve it.
I have made my resolutions.
Under the present circumstances, I will not step down.
I have a mandate from the people, and I will fulfill it.
Should this situation of force prevail, I shall be obliged,
for the sake of the Republic, and in accordance with the Constitution,
to take measures beyond an immediate vote.
France is threatened by dictatorship.
There are those who would force her to submit to a power
that would take hold amidst the despair of the nation.
No, I say!
The Republic will not abdicate.
The people will come to their senses.
Progress, independence, and peace will carry the day, alongside freedom.
Vive la République! Vive la France!
French Radio and Television Broadcasting.
And now, a speech from General de Gaulle, president of the Republic.
Frenchwomen, Frenchmen,
as the bearer of the legitimacy of the nation and the Republic,
I have over the past 24 hours considered every single eventuality...
The same speech opens the documentary The Two Marseillaises
by André Labarthe and Jean-Louis Comolli.
Here, either everyone is glued to the radio,
or de Gaulle is speaking to no-one,
as if people were no longer paying attention,
as if the general no longer mattered.
It would be wrong to believe in the second hypothesis.
Everyone heard.
De Gaulle had mastered the signs and understood
the nature of means of communication.
On the eve of the speech, he had disappeared for over 24 hours.
The country felt the void of his absence.
Now De Gaulle reappeared as the legendary voice
that had led the liberation of France during World War ll.
He chose radio since he knew that few would be in front of a TV that afternoon,
but also so as not to show his old man's face.
Now he was all voice,
all strength.
He called on the French to resist.
He insinuated that he wouldn't blanch at using force,
and spoke of subversion, tyranny, and totalitarianism.
A journalist wrote:
“Ça y est. Firm, clear, angry,
the old soldier, perhaps a little mad.”
With a transistor radio clamped to his ear,
the Parisian chief of police was awed by de Gaulle's might.
“It's Zeus,” he exclaimed.
The address lasted 4 minutes, 32 seconds.
Neither this nor the other films show what happened afterwards.
What happened afterwards was this.
Once the speech was over, 500,000 people took to the Champs-Elysees
in support of de Gaulle.
In terms of attendance, it was the largest protest in France that May.
This protest features better, more expensive clothing than the other marches of May.
There are plenty of cashmere sweaters draped over shoulders to ward off draughts.
But the ruling class weren't the only ones there.
Small businessmen terrified by anarchy,
traditional housewives,
good respectable girls, conservative students,
lovers of order, they all came.
They shouted: “Vive de Gaulle” and “Cohn-Bendit to Berlin.”
Some shouted: “Cohn-Bendit to Dachau.”
An admirer commented:
"De Gaulle won without firing a single shot.”
That afternoon would mark the start of the difficult transition back to normalcy.
The Return to Work at the Wonder Factory.
The only surviving sequence from an unfinished film,
directed by two students at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographical Studies in Paris.
On the morning of June 10th, 1968,
after three weeks on strike with the factory occupied,
the workers at Wonder, in Saint-Ouen,
brought together by their employers, voted to return to work, 560 to 260.
That same day, at 1:30 p.m.
The sequence shot lasts ten minutes and shows how May came to an end.
We didn't get anything... we just got less vacation.
[The boss] backed down?
Like hell he backed down...
Yes, but now we've got to remain vigilant...
The young worker's interlocutors are two union bosses.
Everyone decided to go back...
No, I'm not going back in there.
I'm never setting foot in that pigsty again...
Come in, just to see what a rathole it is...
We get filthy, we turn all black...
Office workers couldn't care less..
All they want to do is kiss up to the boss.
Now it's over, we won't be getting anything else...
Not with this boss.
That's what you were saying three weeks ago.
The boss knows what he's lost.
? it's just a stage.
At Wonder, it'll never be the way it was.
The workers will have to stay sharp.
They screwed us on the vote!
We know that, we're going to report it.
Well, we can't have everything all at once...
It's just a stage... now...
The vote was sabotaged, that's a fact.
They screwed us, that's a fact.
There wasn't a single workers' representative at the vote count...
They pressured the North Africans, the Algerians, the Portuguese...
They tricked us...
There'd be no lack of witnesses, in that case.
? it's a victory, are you hearing me?
It's a victory. They backed down.
They wouldn't even hear about the wages...
they gave a 10% raise...
there's the issue of vacation,
they wanted you to work during your vacation...
and they had to back down.
They might deny it, but that doesn't matter.
Well, there are still things to be fought for... night work...
But why?
These folks take on all the work just to get an extra half day's pay, don't they?
It only affects certain people.
The workers who are returning today are united,
quite conscious of what they've done.
The worker, whose name is Jocelyne, feels betrayed.
Now they try to convince her that, in May,
the only things at stake were wages and working conditions.
Not another way to organize production,
not another way of life.
There are over 200 in the union...
Yes, but... that's what matters...
...that's what matters now...
Before, there was nothing in place at Wonder.
They did whatever they wanted.
Now they can't do whatever they want anymore.
And this is the victory won by the workers at Wonder.
Ah, don't pretend it's a victory.
So it's a defeat, then?
No, but even so, they're going back...
- Do you work at Wonder? - No.
Then please, please, don't say anything.
Ask the workers at Wonder.
I know about the horrible conditions.
No, you don't.
Yes, I do.
Hey, didn't you tell me that the working conditions are terrible...
The student no longer matters.
Politically, he's become irrelevant, and the camera no longer seeks him out.
We turn black, we come out of there looking like a bunch of coal miners.
There's not even hot water for us to wash up.
They have sinks of course, and all the rest.
Ours is just disgusting.
In under three weeks he's gone from protagonist to extra.
When he does appear, it's only because there's a union leader in the frame.
You've got to be careful...
because, with 500?
500? And who are these five hundred, for starters?
And what if some of the 500, for example, were openly against the workers?
Maybe you should...
I think it'd be best to talk to the folks who are still at Wonder...
I think she's being clear...
I'm not saying anything beyond what she is.
- Yes, you are. - No, I'm not!
You are!
Quite simply?
If you called her up, shouldn't she speak?
We're just letting them walk all over us, that's all.
We don't even have the right to go to the toilet.
Wonder employees, please enter and resume your work quietly.
Calmly.
That's it.
Once again, Wonder employees, please enter and resume your work quietly.
Fine, then.
With one fess week.
You bastard!
Well, I'm not going in. No way.
Leaving the factory
July 1968 in France.
Summertime, and the beach.
Fewer than 60 days had passed since the barricades of May.
Sartre had warned Cohn-Bendit:
“Vacation will come,
a decrease in intensity, certainly a step back.”
A journalist wrote that, while spring '68 in France had belonged to utopia,
summer would belong to order and the Right.
It would also bring a return to normalcy, which my parents hadn't foreseen.
May set off our temporary return to Brazil.
It seems that we left France by car,
crossing the Belgian border, where we caught a plane home.
Paris had come to a halt, with the airport and the trains on strike.
On the night of the 24th, the protests reached the neighborhood where we lived.
We returned for fear of chaos and the revolution.
Cohn-Bendit at the end of May, at the Sorbonne,
after the German trip funded by Paris Match.
Fouchet, the Minister of the Interior, had tried to keep him from returning to Paris,
alleging that he'd caused public disorder.
Cohn-Bendit was the son of Germans who had fled Nazism,
and now the government of France was closing its doors to him.
These images show him hours after secretly entering the country,
wearing dark glasses, his hair dyed black.
We declare that, starting today, all militants expelled from France
will be brought back to France by us when we say so.
Any questions?
How did I get to France?
By car.
Over the German border.
So you fled?
I didn't flee Germany.
My father fled Germany,
But I was born in France and I chose to fight here.
Does that bother you?
Not in the slightest.
Will you stay at the Sorbonne?
For the meantime, yes.
Quiet!
I request that the party responsible for the police entering the Sorbonne
be expelled from France, for having caused public disorder in the country.
And I demand that whoever made the decision to expel me,
for having caused disorder in the streets of Paris,
be expelled from France, even if it's Fouchet himself.
Are you happy to be back in France?
Not happy, but I find it quite funny.
Now, something for the newspapers of the bourgeois press.
Don't twist what I've said too much.
I was clear and simple. I barely said anything.
There's no reason to make things up.
Looking at Cohn-Bendit in this interview,
and seeing in his cockiness the power of the generation he represented,
one gets the impression that '68 was just beginning,
and that the future was bright.
In fact, by that point, May 28th, the movement had lost its strength.
A prosperous West German publishing house with an eye on the market
commissioned a book from Conn-Bendit on the student movement.
“They offered me 150,000 francs, and I was living off 500 a month.
In six weeks, my brother and I cobbled the book together,” he wrote.
It was a slapdash book, written for the money.
Cohn-Bendit went to Hamburg to turn in the proofs and get his check.
Only three months had passed since May of '68.
It was August 21st, summer in Czechoslovakia,
and Soviet tanks were beginning the occupation of Prague.
This is an amateur film.
The accompanying credits only say “Roll 25",
without identifying the author.
The headline reads:
“We do not agree with the occupation of our country. We protest.”
All we know about the author of Roll 25 is that he or she was in Prague,
and that on August 21st, he or she picked up a camera,
registered the date by filming a newspaper which, I assume, was from that day,
and recorded what he or she saw.
The author filmed urgently,
since what was happening below the balcony affected him or her.
Out there, the invading forces led by the Soviet Union
were beginning the occupation of the city.
750,000 soldiers from the USSR, Bulgaria,
Poland and Hungary put an end to the Prague Spring,
the political opening begun seven months before.
Carefully, without running any risks, Roll 25 records.
It is as if it said: “This was what happened to us.”
Roll 127, also anonymous.
While Roll 25 simply documented, Roll 127 tells a story,
the story of the occupation.
It begins with the Soviet leaders and then shows the man soon to be deposed,
Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the Prague Spring.
Then, the year.
Then the country, first on the map,
then on the TV, which seems to be showing one of those official parades
celebrating friendship between peoples.
Bit by bit, unlike Roll 25, Roll 127 gets closer to the action.
First it leaves the TV and goes out onto the balcony.
Then it goes down to the streets, to get a better look.
Later, the camera goes back to the apartment.
The images from Roll 127 are not impersonal.
They reflect the perspective of someone,
of a witness who films a watch to record the time things are taking place.
Someone moves in front of the lens.
It may be a son, or a friend.
Just then, there comes the thought of the existence of a family,
or at least a social circle, which is now being threatened
and needs the protection of the curtain.
Nothing like this came out of May in Paris.
Roll 127 emphasizes what it believes should be seen.
For example: the words on the statue of Saint Wenceslas.
Listen, Soviet soldier: we want socialism,
not occupation or the imprisonment of our legitimate representatives."
The names of the subjugated leaders.
The sign that this young woman has just written in Russian
and now shows the camera.
"Go home, we don't need your help."
Likely a place where someone died.
The end of Roll 127 corresponds to the last chapter of the fall.
Roll 127 shows the arrival of the Soviet delegation in the Prague airport.
They have come to enshrine the new leader.
Before a flag-waving crowd,
they all sing what is probably the International.
This is a public event, in the square, but the author no longer goes out,
preferring to film it through the TV.
Nothing more can be learned on the streets.
Now political resistance means staying at home
and filming the end of politics on TV.
The new leader speaks.
Roll 127 edits in images of people in the background,
as if true power were now wielded by those behind the scenes.
What everyone can see, on their TVs, is the new theater of politics.
Which Roll 127 shows like this.
These home videos exist because freedom of expression didn't end
from one day to the next.
It slipped away bit by bit.
As it went,
I imagine that there grew the urgent need to record
what you could, while you could.
I think that most of these amateurs filmed on impulse,
because this was history happening and they were the weak part.
All they could do was pay witness.
Marta Kubisová, the brunette running after Dubcek,
during the months of the Prague Spring,
was one of the most combative figures in Czech protest music.
In name of all my colleagues,
I would like to thank you and affirm our loyalty.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
I recognized you before you recognized me.
I'd like to give you a little something.
It's stuck in there.
Thank you very much.
It's my talisman.
Really? Thank you so much.
No, thank you.
We love you.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Let me make sure the thing is really in there.
Jesus, if it's fallen out it'll be a nightmare.
It fell out. Probably inside the car...
No matter.
I'll bring it another time.
It's all right, we'll see each other again.
Thank you very much.
No, we'd really like to thank you.
May this land remain in peace.
Wrath, envy, rancor, fear, and discord,
let them pass,
and pass away soon.
When you have lost control of your destiny
it will return to you,
the people will return to you.
In 1968, this song of hers became one of the symbols of the resistance.
The fade into the tanks is from the original.
To have an idea of what a political regression is made of:
Marta Kubisová in the following year, 1969.
Beyond the deepest sea, beyond the highest peak,
beyond the forest sadder than the eyes of the children,
crows' wings, thousands of crows,
there where nine rivers flow.
Listen.
Beyond the thousandth gate, there lies the Land of the Bells,
and there, the people of the bells ring ceaselessly on
in the name of your tears, your smile,
ring-o-ding, in the name of your sins.
Listen.
They say that the bells of the lyrics were an allegory for hope,
representing the good news that would someday be brought by new generations,
as innocent as these baby animals.
Or something like that.
Strange Autumn.
The director signs his or her name:
V. Rula.
Of the amateurs, he or she is the first to do so.
It's a touching detail, but its meaning isn't clear.
Perhaps a sign of newfound political stability, posing less danger;
it may be an act of conscience
on the part of someone who wants to express him or herself fearlessly;
or it may be a private gesture, someone only signing his or her name
because he or she knows that this is a home movie,
to be tucked away like a private diary.
The credits to Strange Autumn read:
“Attempt to capture the disheartened air of the autumn of '68.”
There are no more tanks or soldiers,
only the consequences of their passing through the city.
The director lingers on the memorial to the last person to die during the occupation:
the worker Marie Charouskova, on August 28th, at age 25.
With no fanfare, Strange Autumn shows how life adapts.
Children need to be taken to the park.
Families go for walks.
Work goes on.
Commenting on what these images show, writer and future president Václav Havel
would say, in the late '80s:
“The death of Jan Palach, which would have been inexplicable at another time,
was perfectly understood by all of society,
because his death was the utmost expression, almost a symbol, of the state of our souls.
Faced with an absolute lack of answers,
everyone understood that Palach desperately needed an extreme act.
Each of us felt that same need.”
Jan Palach was a literature student.
Five months after the tanks rolled in, on January 16th, 1969,
in downtown Prague, he soaked himself in gas and struck a match.
He was 20 years old, and he survived a few days before dying.
To the doctor who treated him,
he said that his gesture was more than a protest against the occupation.
It was a cry against the resignation taking hold in the country.
Later, that doctor would say:
“The silent multitudes in the streets,
with downcast eyes and serious expressions -
when you look at them, you realize what everyone has already understood:
that even decent people are resigning themselves,
and will not take long to adapt to the new order.”
Across the world, many died during the events of 1968.
Very few of them merited public burials.
The images of these funerals reflect the many political uses of corpses and martyrs.
Here is what can be said, based on these records.
That Palach's was carried out in an environment of certain freedom.
These images are authorized.
The people advance down the streets of the city, finding no resistance.
The cameras of January, unlike those of August,
neither shake nor film through windowpanes.
That Palach's makes it clear that, when someone dies, people suffer.
And that, in that sense, Palach's was the only one
where the human dimension of the tragedy
wasn't devoured by the political dimension.
March of 1968.
The student Edson Luís is killed by the military police of Rio de Janeiro.
He was a poor boy from Belém do Pará, and he was 18 years old.
At four in the afternoon,
the coffin starts out on the 6-km route from downtown to the South Zone.
Filmmakers Eduardo Escorel and José Carlos Avellar
head out to record the procession.
In addition to theirs, there are also cameras from news agencies.
Avellar films the protest in front of the National Students' Union building.
Escorel goes into an apartment building,
rings a few bells, and asks permission to film.
From there, he records the long train of the procession.
Just like in Prague, the mechanisms of repression are invisible.
An agreement with the Army had taken the soldiers off the streets.
Unlike in Prague, nobody seems to weep for Edson Luís.
Who was he?
Who mourned his death?
Did he have a mother, father, relative, girlfriend, friend?
The images don't show it.
But he did, of course.
The newspapers the next day say that his family was there.
But the literature on the period doesn't speak about them.
And the films don't show them.
At least in the recorded footage, Edson Luís disappears into his grave
with no solemnities, no moment of silence.
Of the 23 minutes of material captured by several cameras,
only 18 seconds show someone suffering.
She might be a girlfriend, sister, or friend,
or a stranger moved by an 18-year-old boy, murdered far from his home.
Edson Luís is buried with more indignation than pain.
Gilles, refuse all the betrayals
of those who want to make us believe that the provocateurs aren't the cops,
but rather you and your comrades.
Gilles, our hate for your assassins, for those who armed them and who lie.
We will fight, united, unto the victory of all the workers.
Gilles Tautin was the only student to die in France, in the fallout from May.
He was a high school student, and died on June 10th, 1968,
near a Renault factory,
during a protest in solidarity with the striking workers.
When he saw the riot police bearing down,
Tautin threw himself into the Seine and drowned.
He was 17 years old.
Farewell, noblest of brothers.
For your pains, the pain of death
Or imprisonment for Hie.
But the time has come, and the victorious people
Stir, breathe, and thrive.
Farewell, comrades, farewell, noble hearts.
The scenes of Tautin's funeral appear in at least two films of the period.
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, Flins 68 from a collective of Maoist filmmakers;
and this one, The Pretty Month of May,
by a collective at the Vincennes film school.
In both, we learn that Gilles Tautin was a student
and that he died for the people's cause.
That is the summary of who he was.
This is the last line in the film.
Despite the deaths of the workers in Sochaux,
of the Parisian high-schooler Gilles Tautin, and others,
despite the 3,000 wounded in Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse,
despite the Moody crackdown in Flins, the students and workers of May '68
learned in practice that revolution is possible.
The electoral mirage fell away. The reformist utopia
and promises of participation came to rescue the quivering bourgeois edifice.
The student movement revealed its revolutionary potential.
The working Mass recognized the strength of its autonomous movement.
Their forces remain intact, their combative spirit stronger than ever.
Their experience, irreversible.
The triumphal narrative finds a positive value in death.
Tautin didn't die in vain,
and his tragedy served to herald the advent of a more just society.
In being just that, he went through life
without leaving traces as a son, brother, or friend.
And since the more just society failed to materialize,
Tautin also fails as a symbol.
In Sochaux, the week was one of mourning.
France. June 11th.
The police invade the Peugeot factory in the city of Sochaux,
ending the occupation.
The factory worker Pierre Beylot, age 24, is hit by a shot from the riot police.
This newsreel includes scenes of his funeral.
We see those who stood close by his body.
The film Sochaux, June 11th, by Bruno Muel and a workers' collective,
mentions Beylot's death, but, with the exception of two stills,
includes no scenes of the funeral.
The directors have taken a different political tack.
The film speaks of his death with generic footage of the workers' movement,
over which the directors add a soapbox speech.
Just like Tautin the student,
Beylot the worker dies in the service of the cause.
To all those who ask why the red flag
has been hoisted atop the occupied factories,
and what its meaning is, these weeks of our struggle,
and, above all, this day, June 11th, stands as an answer.
In Lyon, in the early afternoon, the funeral of Officer Lacroix,
killed during the disturbances of Friday night.
René Lacroix was a police officer in Lyon.
He died on the night of the 24th.
He was crushed against a wall by a driverless truck,
sent towards him with the accelerator held down by a pile of bricks.
He died hours later in the hospital,
either from his wounds or felled by a heart attack.
Officer Lacroix, in attempting to stop it,
was crushed between the truck and the bridge wall.
He died shortly thereafter.
Yesterday, the youthful perpetrators were arrested and charged with murder.
The funeral rites for Officer René Lacroix
are not included in any canonical film about May of '68.
Nor are they shown on the retrospectives on the anniversary of the movement.
They appear here, in a provincial newsreel.
The death of Lacroix is scarcely referenced in the literature on May of '68.
Frenchwomen, Frenchmen,
My best wishes for a happy New Year,
from the bottom of my heart.
A heart that, for some time, let me say,
has not been spared from worrying as to the fate of France.
The general, on December 31st, 1968.
He started out by speaking about the return to order,
the reaffirmation of the State's authority,
the abyss that France had just barely skirted.
“We almost fell into the sea, like sailors seduced by sirens”, he said.
This was the most predictable part.
The other, surprisingly,
was dedicated to what he called the mal du siècle,
the malady afflicting our souls.
He wasn't referring to violence or anarchy, but to the moral desolation
sprung from the disconnect between the world of work and that of the spirit.
That was how people were living now,
in this mechanical, materialist, abstract civilization.
He didn't use the word, but it was meaning he was talking about,
as if to say that it was impossible to go on
without a good reason to get out of bed in the morning.
In saying this, he described the dilemma that, in years to come,
would face those who had felt the intensity of those weeks of May.
In my opinion, this is the most beautiful film about the period.
To Die at Thirty, by Romain Goupil.
It's the story of a great friendship, between the director
and one of the leaders of May in France, the student Michel Récanati.
In '69 we got together to piece together, bit by bit,
the story of the Lycée rebellions in 1967.
Goupil is speaking, in the black shirt.
Récanati is in the middle, in white.
We got the schools to protest, and it wasn't a well-behaved protest
like we were used to, or like the PCF had gotten us used to,
but a real clash with the police.
I'd like to emphasize that, up until then,
we'd held as many protests as we liked.
It was the first time that we led them to prohibit it.
And it was the first time that policemen were ready to hit us.
This was a novelty in domestic politics
and the shape of things to come.
The awareness that time is passing is always painful, a friend used to say.
That is the “toll of life”, as he put it.
But not so soon.
These three are around 20 years old and they're already writing their memoirs.
Dealing with such precocious nostalgia
will be the challenge put to an entire generation.
Sylvain, the first JCR student who 1 met in '66.
Michel who convinced me, and who became my best friend,
helped me in this task of reconstructing our story as students,
from Revolt to Revolution.
How to think for a moment that Michel might kill himself one day?
I don't know, in that case we'll stop.
We can come back to it at some point.
Five years from now.
Not five years...
This is the start of To Die at Thirty.
To die at thirty.
This film is a bit of her story.
She was a tall, gorgeous brunette.
A student, a militant, she looked after the high-schoolers.
I first came across her in '66.
She was in charge of our theoretical and practical training.
I was secretly in love with her, and I wasn't the only one.
She was a tall, gorgeous brunette.
She died.
She committed suicide.
To die at thirty.
This film is a bit of his story.
I had become a militant, and he was my first recruit at Lycée Condorcet.
We became inseparable. We did everything together.
One day, on the way back from a congress, he died in a car crash.
Later, I became a film assistant.
I noticed Pierre-Louis, who worked as an errand-boy on the set.
He was an older militant. I did everything I could to get him into filmmaking.
We did it. He became an assistant editor.
Later, one night, he committed suicide.
On March 23rd, 1978,
Michel's parents told me that he had disappeared,
leaving his documents and money at home.
I shuddered.
Michel was all my political history, my only friend.
Since 1966, I'd shared a life of militancy with him.
Years and years of plans, dreams, illusions.
Hundreds of meetings. All the marches.
During all those years, Michel and I were as one.
That's why I told his family
that he must've taken off hastily on some new adventure.
“Under the paving-stones, the beach.”
The phrase that best summed up the promise of May.
After the struggle, there would come not only justice,
but also the sea,
pleasure, vacation, partying,
joy.
Killian Fritsch, a student with a lyrical soul,
picked up a paving-stone on the Rive Gauche,
saw sand underneath, and thought:
“Under the paving-stones, the beach.”
That's how it goes in the books that celebrate the period.
It's not the only version.
Here's another.
The student wasn't a student, but the owner of an advertising agency.
The phrase didn't pop into the head of a student inspired by the revolution.
It was the product of the grueling work
of two admen looking for a slogan that could mobilize their comrades.
“Killian Fritsch was 28 years old, and he was my boss”,
wrote one of the creators of the phrase.
This is his version.
“At night, in a café, we started thinking up ideas for a new graffiti slogan,
until, after a ton of crap, I got something:
'There's weed underneath the paving-stones.'
We were getting close, but Killian didn't like 'weed',
he thought it was kind of hippie.
We were very different, and it wasn't easy
to find an image of a perfect future that would satisfy both of us.
This was the only one, tied to our childhood joys at the beach.”
So the phrase that came to represent the libertarian lyricism of May
was born from the brainstorming of two admen working at an agency
with an Americanized name: the Internote Service.
Everything is not as it seems.
And now, the end of the story.
“The story has a dramatic end”,
Fritsch's friend wrote:
“Killian couldn't bear the lukewarm disillusionment
that came over those who had believed too deeply in '68.
He grew depressed,
and one night he threw himself under the subway train at Gaité Station.”
Maybe Killian Fritsch lived near the station.
Or maybe he crossed the entire city to kill himself there,
in a final gesture of bitter irony,
since Gaité, in French, means joy.
Throughout the 60s, my mother appears in a number of home films.
These are vacation trips, snippets of life, birthday parties.
She seems happy, basking in being alive.
Starting in the 70s, the images become scarcer,
and from '80 onward, there's hardly anything at all.
Looking at everything that was left,
I always return to the footage from China.
These are poor, badly filmed images.
But they are the record of my mother's encounter
with the reality of a country that was the opposite of everything she knew.
As I remember it,
nothing made my mother light up like the memory of that time.
She spoke of it with delight,
with joy,
with an intensity that time would come to steal from her.
She was happy in China,
and that's why I like to think of her there,
back when everything seemed possible.
At the heart of what my mother considered beautiful,
there was the idea of the unexpected.
Beauty lay in surprise, in that which couldn't be foreseen.
Here she is, in Japan.
She thought everything a bit more predictable, and wrote:
“Japanese planning is obviously cerebral.
The Chinese sort can trick the hasty observer.
While much more profound, and bearing an almost philosophical meaning,
it retains the illusion of haphazardness.”
This is a bit complicated.
I understand that my mom is establishing a hierarchy
between the surprising and the predictable,
finding the surprising superior.
This is how she sums up this preference:
“After the shock of the unlooked-for encounter,
there comes the ineffable emotion of the unexpected form.”
That phrase describes her encounter with China.
There, she found not just flowers, bridges, and lakes
that took her breath away,
but also men and women
whose life experiences were radically different from her own.
She spoke with laborers, peasants, medical students,
Party ideologues, and railway workers.
Everything was new.
Everything piqued her curiosity,
making her keenly aware of being there,
at that moment in history.
Her account is charged with emotion.
“The ineffable emotion that follows the shock
of the unlooked-for encounter.”
Something new was blooming,
something moving and vital.
Young Mao writes,
and we don't know what.
In a novel by Norwegian author Per Petterson,
the main character,
a Maoist militant drawing close to middle age,
speculates about a photograph of Mao that he had in his bedroom
when he was a young student.
“The picture of Mao I had was the well-known retouched photo
where he sits hunched over his desk,
writing with one of those Chinese brush pens,
and I always hoped
that it was not one of his political or philosophical articles he was writing,
but one of his poems, perhaps the one which begins:
Fragile images of departure,
the village back then.
I curse the river of time:
thirty-two years have passed.”
And the character goes on:
"I hoped this was the poem Cause it showed the human Mao
someone I was drawn to,
someone who had felt how time was battling his body,
as I had felt it so often myself;
how time without warning could catch up with me
and run around beneath my skin
like tiny electric shocks
and I could not stop them, no matter how much I tried.
And when they let up at last
and everything fell quiet,
I was already a different person than I had been before,
and it sometimes made me despair.”
My life hastens on
Like the rain falling from the roof
My life hastens on
Like the rain falling from the roof
I'm too young to die
And have red roses on my tomb
I'm too young to die
And have red roses on my tomb
IN THE INTENSE NOW
FOR EDUARDO COUTINHO