Gerhardt Christina - 1968 and Global Cinema

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND MEDIA SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

GENERAL EDITOR

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

ADVISORY EDITORS

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

2018 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging Number: 9780814342930

ISBN 978-0-8143-4293-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4542-9 (printed case)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4294-7 (ebook)

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CONTENTS

Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi

Robert Stam

Lily Saint

Rocco Giansante

Peter Hames

Christina Gerhardt

Rita de Grandis

Morgan Adamson

David Desser

Graeme Stout

Mauro Resmini

Man-tat Terence Leung

Paula Rabinowitz

Allyson Nadia Field

Sarah Hamblin

J. M. Tyree

Victor Fan

Laurence Coderre

Pablo La Parra-Prez

Sara Saljoughi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Annie Martin, our editor at Wayne State University Press, understood the importance of the book from our first conversation. We thank her for her vision, support, and flexibility as the book grew from idea to a fully realized manuscript.

We thank Barry Keith Grant, editor of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series, for his enthusiasm and support for the project. We would like to thank the anonymous readers for their generous feedback, which helped shape the volume into the book it is today. We thank Dawn Hall, copy-editor, for working so diligently and precisely. Many thanks to Rachel Ross, the designer of the book, for understanding our vision and exceeding our expectations. We thank the promotions, marketing, and advertising team for their stellar work: Kristina Stonehill, Emily Nowak, and Jamie Jones. Last but not least, we thank Kristin Harpster, Editorial, Design, and Production Manager, for her excellent work.

The book benefited from several conference panels devoted to the topic of 1968 and global cinema at the 2016 and 2017 meetings of SCMS, the 2016 and 2017 ACLA conference, and the 2017 MLA. We thank the MLA executive committee on Screen Arts and Culture for sponsoring the panel on this topic. The papers and audiences at these conferences confirmed our suspicion that there is much, much more to say about the long 1968.

Our deepest gratitude goes to our contributors, whose work has shaped the book into something far beyond what we initially imagined. As 1968 and Global Cinema developed, we were fortunate to have the involvement of existing friends and colleagues, as well as the formation of new intellectual communities, some of which have already produced new collaborations. We look forward to future conversations and projects generated by this volume.

INTRODUCTION

Looking Back

Global Cinema and the Legacy of New Waves around 1968

Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi

The year 1968 was a watershed that brought about radical political and social changes internationally. These changes are both reflected in and constitutive of new cinemas around 1968. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, anticolonial wars of self-liberation and self-determination were being waged throughout Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. A vibrant discourse critical of imperialism formed a key node of the social and student movements of the 1960s, with particular attention paid to the transition from the Indochina Wars to the US-Vietnam War. The conditions that these movements sought to change varied from country to country, but their lasting impact and their dialogue is undeniable.

On its fiftieth anniversary, the year 1968 continues to signify predominantly the massive demonstrations by students in France and in the United States. In cinema, too, 1968 is primarily associated with the French or US traditions. The aesthetics and politics of the cinemas of 1968 intersect with new waves, national cinema traditions, political cinemas, debates on realism and modernism, and significant changes in the study of film. 1968 and Global Cinema takes the occasion of the anniversary of May 1968 to explore the interplay of political and aesthetic affiliations that make up this historical moment, to examine lesser known film cultures engaged in the politics of 1968, and to provide new readings of canonical film texts of what, following Fredric Jameson, we will call the long sixties and the long 1968. The notion of a long 1968 opens the cipher of 1968 to consider how the politics and aesthetics preceding and following this date inform 1968. In order to think of 1968 as long, a longer, more processual periodization and one that emphasizes a wide-ranging set of artistic, political, social, and economic practices and forces must be taken into consideration.

The influence of both anticolonial discourse and international solidarity movements on film cultures around 1968 forms a key focus of the book. This volume reexamines the complex ways in which the politics and the image of the 1960s were undertaken differently in varied national, linguistic, cultural, and political contexts. As we move into a new century of political cinema, it is ever more vital to write new genealogies and histories of radical cinema. In part, this attempt to write new histories of 1968 and of global, political cinemas attends to the rather belated discussion of the global and non-Western in the disciplines of film, media, and visual studies. In writing this new history of 1968, our emphasis in this volume is on the political and aesthetic affinities across film cultures, the influence of anticolonial discourse, of international solidarity, of discourses of modernism and realism, and of radical documentary traditions. Following Sylvia Harvey, we are analyzing this crucial historical moment moved by the need to view it and review it in the hopes of constructing a future as well as a past.

Given the wide range of scholarship on May 68 in France, one question that emerges is how to revisit this topic today using a new approach. Our perspective in this book is that although scholarship exists on the late 1950s and 1960s new waves, little research puts cinemas of and on 1968 into dialogue across national boundaries. Most of the published scholarship focuses on the celebrated films of the French New Wave,various afterlives in part through screenings at film festivals or as special film programming.

Another significant area of research examines the new modes of analysis that began post-1968 due primarily to the influence of Marxism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis on film studies. Sylvia Harveys May 68 and Film Culture focuses largely on the events in France and the broader shifts in film culture and scholarship that developed in and around the politics of the era.

In a different vein, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith suggests that what is signified by the 1960s is vastly different and cannot be understood blankly as a narrative of modernization, which he argues has been the dominant characterizations of the period. This notion has guided the study of cinemas of the 1960s, particularly those around 1968. As this volume argues, close investigation of the relationship of cinema to political collectives, anti-colonial struggles, workers groups, feminist movements, and student activism makes it possible to consider cinemas of and around 1968 in global terms. The politics of the long 1968 make it impossible to understand cinemas of the period through a center-periphery model.