http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/11/05/la-commune/
I am very happy to report that Peter Watkinss
La Commune is now available in DVD/Video. This
six-hour film, which originally appeared on
French television, joins Sergei Eisensteins 10
Days that Shook the World, Gillo Pontecorvos
Battle of Algiers and Herbert Bibermans Salt
of the Earth as a classic study of working people trying to win their freedom.
Perhaps its greatest achievement is the way it
makes this 135 year old struggle relevant to more
recent ones, which was clearly the intention of
its director Peter Watkins. As I sat watching it
at the edge of my seat, practically breaking out
in a cold sweat, I could not stop thinking about
my visits to Nicaragua in the late 1980s when the
country like somebody hanging on to the edge of a
cliff by their fingers. La Commune demonstrates
that this is both the blessing and the curse of
all revolutions. They are simultaneously great
strides forward toward freedom and huge risks
almost tantamount to Russian roulette.
Several years after the Sandinistas were ousted,
Carlos Vilas, an Argentine sociologist and
supporter of the revolution, spoke at a meeting
in New York. I will never forget how he
characterized it. It was like doctors in a
delivery room with no electricity during an
earthquake. When working people try to take
power, they are not only faced with their own
inexperience as masters of society, they are
faced with the immediate hostility and open
sabotage of the old ruling classes. I have never
seen a film that conveys this dilemma as well as La Commune.
Watkinss best known film is the 1965 The War
Game, which is a faux news report on a nuclear
war. La Commune uses the same technique.
Imagining television as having been invented by
1871, it presents two reporters from a peoples
TV station interviewing National Guardsmen (the
volunteers who defended the Commune), workers,
women, students on one side and their bourgeois
adversaries on the other. One of the films major
themes is how the media is used to frame reality
on a class basis. Although this film was made in
1999, it anticipates the great divide that would
take place in Venezuela 3 years later when
private television and newspapers were used as a
battering ram against Hugo Chavezs progressive
government. As counterpoint to the two
sympathetic reporters, La Commune features
reports from a mainstream television reporter who
has all the unctuously obnoxious qualities of a
Jim Lehrer or a Brian Williams. Thinly disguised
as objective journalism, the reports have the
thinly disguised class hatred that you found
recently in reports on Hugo Chavezs speech at the United Nations.
Back in 1871, the Paris Commune was greeted with
the same kind of outrage that Daniel Ortega met
in the 1980s (and still does today, despite his
political retreat) and Hugo Chavez meets today.
Here is what the New York Times said on May 25, 1871:
Its friends claim that the bloody vengeance of
the Monarchists will not blot out the Commune
from the memory of the future. This is perfectly
true. It has gained during the last two days an
ignominy so colossal that future generations will
be compelled to ransack the records of Mohammedan
fanaticism for its parallel. Its sins against
civilization are manifest, its sins against
liberty will shortly be made equally apparent.
The cause of municipal freedom has received for
the present generation the stamp of insane license.
The cast of La Commune consists entirely of 200
non-professionals drawn from Paris and its
suburbs, including a number of undocumented
workers from North Africa. Before filming
started, they read background material on the
Paris Commune and thought about its relevance to
their lives and to contemporary society. A number
of them are interviewed in the excellent
documentary on the film, including an Algerian
who lives in the suburbs that exploded in anger
last year over joblessness and neglect. La
Commune is filled with truly revelatory
historical details, including the way in which
the reactionary Versailles government dispatched
the same army against a revolt in Algeria
immediately after it had vanquished the Commune.
Although the jailed Communards (those who did not
face the firing squad) received amnesty in 1880,
the Berbers remained imprisoned on New Caledonia.
La Commune has a distinct look and feel that is
much different from what you might be accustomed
to. All of the action takes place indoors in an
abandoned factory leased for the occasion.
Although the sets give a reasonable approximation
of the 11th arrondissement, a working class
bastion, they serve more as they would in a
theater than in a film. Most of the
verisimilitude stems from the remarkable ability
of the nonprofessional actors to appear like the
Communards through remarkable wardrobe choices.
With their ordinary-looking if not rough-hewn
faces filmed in black-and-white by hand-held
cameras, they have the same vividness as 19th century photographs.
In contrast to more the recent period when the
left has tried to reconcile itself to religion,
usually through the medium of liberation
theology, La Commune gives no quarter to the
Catholic Church, which is depicted as a source of
blind reaction, just as it was in the Spanish
Civil War and other landmark struggles. Women,
who play a decisive role and in the historical
Commune, give the nuns and priests frequent tongue-lashings.
Since the Paris Commune was the first government
in history to give women the vote, it was
inevitable that women volunteered to fight on the
barricades to protect this freedom and others.
The film portrays the activities of the Womans
Union, which pressed for womens rights within
the general emancipatory framework in a fashion
reminiscent of Salt of the Earth.
The La Commune DVD package includes a 78 minute
documentary on the making of the film by Geoff
Bowie titled The Universal Clock: the Resistance
of Peter Watkins that makes clear how much the
making of the film was in the spirit of
resistance that it depicted. Watkins made this
film in the same way that the Communards made
barricades, as a conscious act in defense of an
alternative society. In a world grown
increasingly commercial and culturally dominated
by Hollywood, he made a film that championed
historys working class martyrs and the act of pure artistic creation itself.
The universal clock is a reference to the
standard 47 minute documentary that is marketed
to television stations around the world to fill
an hour of commercial programming (and
increasingly nonprofit stations as well.) Bowie
films some particularly odious figures at a
television production conference peddling their
wares. After representative from the Discovery
Network brags that their shows can be slotted in
anywhere in the world, we cannot help but think
of what drove French farmer Jose Bove to burn
down a McDonalds the same year that La Commune was being made.
After initial frustration in getting funding for
La Commune, Watkins eventually hooked up with
La Sept ARTE, a French television company willing
to take risksbut unfortunately only up to a
point. When the series was finally aired, the
climax of the film was scheduled for 3:30 in the morning.
On Peter Watkinss website, he conveys the
thinking of universal clock purveyors:
Some people can make the universal clock sing at
47 minutes
others cant. Its perfectly
possible to do the 100 Years War in 5, 10, 20 or
47 minutes
the depth of information value is
not about duration, its about the anticipated expectation of the audience.
Some filmmakers say this is my work and I want it
to stay that way. That is their right and we
respect that right. Those are the films we dont
buy and those are the films we dont transmit.
His response:
What is so disgusting - on top of everything else
- is the use by TV executives of the word
respect! These people have absolutely zero
respect - for filmmakers or for the public.
Respect for work they marginalize, and for the
public on whose behalf they make their decisions,
is contempt and ridicule of the highest order.
This is absolute fascism at work, and anyone who
still doubts the direct links between the
contemporary MAVM [mass audiovisual media] and
globalization in all its worst aspects, should
carefully reflect on what is happening.
The MAVM dogma on length and form is not only
GLOBALIST because of its application, but also
because it directly contributes to loss of
history, to the increase of hierarchical forces
sweeping through society, and to a growing
passive acceptance of the global economy. Without
time or space to reflect, formulate questions,
integrate memory and feelings into the daily
experience of receiving the mass media we are
lost, and history becomes dead. Time and
sustained process are crucial for counteracting
the frenetically fragmented and abbreviated language form of the MAVM.
La Commune is now available from Netflix and
your better video stores. Although I urge
everybody to rent it and to advise their friends
to rent it as well, I particularly recommend it
to the activist left. This film could serve as
the anchor for a weekly series of classes on
socialism. It not only dramatizes the first
working class revolution in history but points in
the direction of our future success in the face
of obvious difficulties. If we cannot band
together on a class basis starting now, then the
class enemy will always have the upper hand. Our
survival as working people and the survival of the planet depends on it.
Peter Watkins website: http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins
