-- By Tom Phillips
 |
| Paris, May 1968 |
Cohn-Bendit was a revolutionary leader who refused to
state a program and didn’t want political power, an artist whose canvas was the
streets of Paris. His time-frame was a
moment – to paraphrase his own words, delivered breathlessly on French radio
and TV – a moment when something else was possible, something other than a life
of drudgery and resentment for the poor, privilege and complacency for the
rich. The best shot in the movie, one that the film-maker reprises several
times in slow motion, is of a college girl dashing back to
the barricades after hurling a piece of paving-stone at the cops, with an
expression of pure bliss, momentarily liberated from every condition of her
life.
De Gaulle – by then a grandfatherly figure delivering fireside
chats on French TV, begins the story with a New Year’s message to the people,
promising more peace and prosperity in 1968. When chaos breaks out in May, he
returns to the TV, demanding law and order, then quickly realizes he has missed
the mark. The general retreats, bides his time until revolutionary fervor
yields to fatigue, and cracks begin to open between striking workers and their
student supporters. Then he attacks – rallying the middle classes, not by TV
but in a stirring three-minute address on the radio, resurrecting the crackling
sound of World War Two and the French Resistance. Vive la Republique, he cries,
Vive la France!
Suddenly, the streets belong to the bourgeoisie. Hundreds
of thousands of well-dressed, solid citizens throng the Champs d’Elysee, the
French Tricolor replaces the red and black flags of revolution. And it’s over. Workers
file glumly back into their factories, stunned students return to class. But
Danny the Red has had his moment, and it will live in the memories of those who
were there, and even those who only read and wrote about it.
I was one of the latter, and Cohn-Bendit was one of my
heroes, especially after an interviewer asked him what he’d do next. He said he planned to disappear, not to a golf
course or a desert island, but “back into the movement.” And he kept his promise. The film shows his
brief brush with celebrity, traveling around Europe with a photographer for
Paris Match. He won fame, then threw it away in disgust. Revolutions are not
financed by middle-class magazines, he concluded. Exit Danny.
The film also takes us to the Prague Spring of 1968, “socialism
with a human face” exemplified by Alexander Dubcek, wreathed in smiles with a
retinue of adoring female folk-singers. Of course, it is followed by the Soviet
invasion, the restoration of deadly communist conformity. The director also takes us, via shaky film
shot by his “dilettante” mother, on a tour of China at the peak of Mao’s Cultural
Revolution, another fantasy of overturning the persistent order of things.
To put it all together in a way that the director does
not, I would say the theme is the eternal possibility, and impossibility, of a
workers’ revolution. In every case, power and wealth re-establish their
dominance, as they have today in China. But
something else is possible, at least in the moment. Cohn-Bendit’s idea of revolution as ecstatic
art is another form of liberation – of little use to the disillusioned factory
worker, but precious to students, poets and film-makers.
That slow-motion shot of the student fleeing back to
the barricades ends in a freeze-frame – she’s in the air, smiling beatifically, shoulders
flung back like wings. In that brilliantly arrested motion, the “intense now” becomes, in Keats’s phrase, a thing of beauty and a joy
forever.
As for a true workers’ revolution, be careful what you
wish for. The closest we've come so far is the 2016 elections, in Britain and the US.
-- Copyright 2018 by Tom Phillips
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