Slogans during May ’68:
“Be Young and Shut Up!”
“Be Realistic, ask for the Impossible.”
1968 was a year of unparalleled ferment: riots all over the world, Martin Luther assassinated, Robert Kennedy soon followed, the Prague Spring crushed, the hippies ecstasied, women and black people fought for equal rights. In France, it was swept by the student riots in May that moved two thirds of the whole work force into strikes and demonstration. Hardly could the French film circle isolate itself from the turbulence. The nouvelle vague directors such as Godard, Truffaut and Lelouch, even stormed to Cannes, staged protest and finally halt the world-class film festival.
May ’68 shaped an entire generation of filmmakers. Godard’s immediate response to the incident was a series of leftist documentaries and a highly reflective film, Everything Is Alright, made in 1972. It creates an epitome of the strike that exposes the tension between social classes, probes into the struggles between gender. Agnès Varda rode on the wave of feminism in the 60’s, making One Sings, the Other Doesn’t to affirm different female identities. Bresson’s rarely screened The Devil, Probably is a resonance of the turbulent Sixties, seeing a twenty-something Parisian who fails to find fulfillment from religion, politics, psychoanalysis, music and even drugs. Louis Malle made a comic turn on the events by naming its satirical film May Fools. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel) and The Dreamers (Bertolucci) are among the latest works that revisit the May events, with one revealing the failure of the student riots while the other intertwines movie, youth nihilism and sexual liberation.
Though May ’68 was a political failure at last, its spirit remains. When we look at the cinematic images of the events forty years later, every one of us can still be moved by the idealism behind the chaos, the genuine heart among raging young souls. This is perhaps the spirit of le French May. |