Introduction: The Powers of Cinema

The essays in this volume are the product of two workshops—the first held at the Château de la Bretesche in Brittany in 2007, with a 2009 follow-up at the Dartmouth College Minary Center in New Hampshire—on the general topic of militant cinema. Addressing slippery terms such as "engagement," "commitment," "activism," and "militancy," we eventually enlarged the frame to formulate the topic as "The Powers of Cinema." Because of our collective conversations at these workshops, followed by individual rethinking and rewriting, the resulting articles intersect and talk to each other, creating a network of themes that echo and reverberate across the present volume.

Each of the contributors approaches the overall topic from a specific angle, and with different aims and assumptions. As a result, the articles explore gradations and even combinations of disclosure, denunciation, critique, and militancy. Several essays reassess the significance of well-known films by reframing them within a pointed political analysis. Sue Harris compares four films produced over more than three decades that look at a single political scandal: the disappearance and probable murder of Moroccan independence leader Mehdi Ben Barka. Steven Ungar looks back on René Vautier's Afrique 50 from the perspective of a longer-term analysis of colonial cinema not available when the film appeared in 1950. Ivone Margulies scrutinizes Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent under a political lens seldom applied to that filmmaker.

Other essays bring classical questions of militancy to bear on specific films. Martin O'Shaughnessy assembles a corpus of recent documentaries about the world of work, asking what level of agency workers have attained in contemporary France, and what contribution the films' representations of workers have made toward supporting their struggles. Still other essays explore the question that Dalton Krauss poses pointedly: Can cinema change the world? Nathalie Rachlin sees that question in juridical terms as a matter of witnessing and justice. Lynn Higgins takes it more literally as a matter of how we see, and how cinema can make us see differently.

Other concerns cutting across these themes include: the legacy/aftermath of colonialism (Harris, Margulies, Ungar, Watts); the social dimensions and potential effectiveness of comedy (Krauss, Higgins); the construction of history and memory (Harris, Margulies, Rachlin); and the effects of censorship (Ungar, Harris, Watts).

All the essays rely on close attention to the ethics and politics of cinematic form—forms of address, cinematography, genres, etc.—asking how artistic choices embody social or political perspectives and prises de position. Philip Watts homes in on the use of sound and a startling moment of silence in a single film to probe the ways cinema can respond to (or cover up) atrocities. And all the essays are built on a question that is sometimes explicit, sometimes underlying: what social effects can cinema actually produce?

Because our conversations at the 2009 follow-up gathering were enriched by the presence of American independent filmmaker John Gianvito, we have chosen to open the volume with an interview. Gianvito helped ground and circumscribe our academic inquiries with questions that were often more concrete and practical. John's engagement as a filmmaker with troubling past events and ongoing conflicts in American history brought into relief some of the historical traumas that define France, and his deep reflections on militancy and the power or powerlessness of cinema are echoed in the articles. Gianvito's filmmaking has been informed by French and other non-U.S. traditions, and his work has solicited intense response around the world. This broad scope of reception reminds us of the many ways in which French film and cinema culture are actually international, through the legacy of colonialism and through the diversity of backgrounds among the filmmakers studied here (Cambodia, Morocco, Francophone West Africa). Finally, the global scope of Gianvito's practice reasserts the ongoing efforts among 'French' filmmakers to question relations between formal innovation and engagement, going back to the late silent era of the 1920s.

It is our hope that this collection of articles sheds light on some of the questions, the anxieties, and the preoccupations that inform French culture and society...