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Framework
The Journal of Cinema and Media

For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema

By Nicole Brenez

To start off, I disagree entirely with the premise: not only was May 1968 filmed, considerably and well, but the period unleashed some of the most magnificent initiatives in the history of cinema in relation both to form and practical organization. For ten years at the Cinémathèque Française I have devoted one part of my programs to the exploration of filming by Collectives, of engaged films, and all of 2008 has been dedicated to a series “May 68 International” (Mexico, Argentina, Japan, USA, UK, Italy . . . ), rich in discovery. The period 1965–1974 is probably the most fertile and most exciting in the history of forms and cinematic propositions, a veritable aesthetic volcano. This does not make the questions you pose for the present any less pertinent, since what the most interesting contemporary cinephilia picks up in part are the critical gestures that led the revolutionary explosions of the 1960s everywhere in the world: collective work, critical examination, emergence of alternative and autonomous cultures. The sites of exchange, of pirating, the blogs, in the work of some, extend the values defended by what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino had theorized under the term “third cinema,” essentially for what concerns counterinformation: think of the work of Indymedia.

But it is necessary also to develop a cinephilic counter-information. The principal battle concerns the present: the production of valuable images is such that no critic, even the indefatigable Jonathan Rosenbaum, no historian, no director of festival can take account of the cinematic production of a given time. Everywhere in the real and virtual worlds leap out propositions about the cinema, even as the history of past cinema remains largely to establish. I believe that there has never been as much work for cinephiles as today: work on the corpus of the past and present, work on the methods of observation, of collecting, of conservation, of analysis, and so on and on.

We can cite several examples. In terms of corpus, an important initiative has been that of Alexis Tioseco in 2005 with the site www.criticine.com, which charts day after day the contours of cinemas of southeast Asia, beginning with the Philippines. In terms of analytic methods, one can only salute still and forever the magnificent site directed by Adrian Martin, Helen Bandis, and Grant McDonald, www.rouge.com.au, which maintains a permanent concern for the internationalization of critical paths/approaches. In terms of conservation/patrimony, Ubuweb, specializing in the avant-gardes, represents a cinephile’s dream. And then there are all the blogs, the sites of artists or individual cinephiles. I will cite only two, both exciting: that of the very independent and solitary Marcel Hanoun, who, in a unique move, has placed all his films online; and that of the great stylist Peter Whitehead, www.nohzone.net, which is an art object in itself and presents the electronic material from which will come his next film, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts.

“The phenomenal pimping of cinema by capitalism since its birth has formed four to six generations of spectators and we find ourselves before a Himalaya of images which constitutes without doubt the greatest modern collection of banalities.”¹ A generation later, no visible improvement: a certain number of poorly informed spectators believe still that Titanic (US, 1997) by James Cameron is a more important film than A Luta Continua (MZ, 1976), an amazing short film shot by Asdrubal Rebelo and Bruno Muel with the Angolan people in struggle, which amounts more or less to believing that some samples of wallpaper are more important that the writings of Arthur Rimbaud. Since the books and accounts of Guy Hennebelle, the history of cinema of armed struggles, guerrillas, and revolutionary combats is no more than just isolated initiatives, like those for example of Alain Weber² or yours on the films of fighters in the Spanish Civil War or the Sandinistas.

The history of cinema resistant to an industrial perspective remains entirely to be written. Today, cinephiles throughout the world find each other and group together easily. One might even say that geographical distance favors mental closeness, for it smoothes the personality quirks or territorial conflicts that often characterize local chapels/congregations. Speaking personally, with my friends and my students, I feel close to cinephiles whom I will perhaps never meet, such as Mubarak Ali and his blog with the elegant title www.supposedaura.blogspot.com, or the shock trio that runs www.fromtheclouds.blogspot.com, “From the Clouds to the Resistance,” Andy Rector, Gabe Klinger, and Zach Campbell, and through them, the rhizome of links they have established. Together, for those who care, they are able, we are able, to establish this rebellious and autonomous history, on a large scale, for whose theoretical and historical foundations the texts of Auguste Blanqui, Walter Benjamin, Malcolm X, the Weather Underground, Howard Zinn, and the books of Amos Vogel, Cinema as a Subversive Art, or Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is. . . , provide the practical literary models. Not only a history of the defeated whose tombs we must rediscover, as the admirable film of John Gianvito, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (US, 2007) has just done, but also a history of free and living creators—and I write this even as the generation of engaged cineastes born at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of 1930s are still alive and working: Rene Vautier, Marcel Hanoun, Raynonde Carasco, and of course Jean-Luc Godard, among others. The task is as formidable as our opportunity to turn upside down the criteria used in the history of cinema.

Here, in a programmatic way, is an engaged look at cinema (which is not the only one that needs to be worked on but the most obscure and repressed, perhaps), the beginning of a list of cineastes who have participated in a revolutionary guerrilla movement or a resistance struggle in the maquis, with a gun, with a camera, or with both at the same time. In the universe of the cinema of domination, they have broken the siege, they have succeeded in a magisterial breakthrough, they have refused the destructive division between the combatant function and the poetic function; they are these “men in struggle announcing the true meaning of their struggle in their own words.”³ You are one of the few who knew the first, so you know well, Jonathan Buchsbaum, that the less familiar the name, the more important it is.

All the filmmakers of the Collectives for Liberation, and so many others, are still ignored.

Nicole Brenez teaches Cinema Studies at the University of Paris-1/Panthéon-Sorbonne and, since 1996, has curated the avant-garde film sessions of the Cinémathèque française. She has also curated film series in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Tokyo, Vienna, London, and Madrid. Her books include Shadows de John Cassavetes (Nathan, 1995), De la Figure en général et du Corps en particulier. L’invention figurative au cinéma (De Boeck Université, 1998), Abel Ferrara (University of Illinois Press, 2007), Traitement du Lumpenproletariat par le cinéma d’avant-garde (Séguier, 2007), Cinémas d’avant-garde (Cahiers du cinéma, 2007), and Abel Ferrara. Le Mal mais sans fleurs (Cahiers du cinéma, 2008). She is the editor or coeditor of Poétique de la couleur. Une histoire du cinéma expérimental (Auditorium du Louvre, 1998), Jeune, dure et pure. Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France (Cinémathéque française/Mazzotta, 2001), La Vie nouvelle/nouvelle Vision (Leo Scheer, 2004), Cinéma/Politique Série 1 (Labor, 2005), Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006), and Jean Epstein: Bonjour Cinéma und andere Schriften zum Kino (Vienna, FilmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2008). She contributes regularly to Trafic, Cahiers du cinéma, and Rouge.

Notes

1. Marguerite Duras, “Du livre au film,” in Des femmes de Musidora, Paroles . . . elles tournent (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1976), 82.

2. Alain Weber, Cinéma(s) français, 1900–39. Pour un monde différent (Paris: Séguier, 2002).

3. Masao Adachi, in Armée rouge-Front Populaire de Libération Palestinien: Déclaration de guerre mondiale (Sekigun-P.F.L.P.-Sekai Senso Sengen) de Masao Adachi (Japan/ Palestine, 1971). We use here the English version by Mio Matsumoto, available at www.bordersphere.com.