The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives

12 Tempered Nostalgia in Recent French Films on the ’68 Years

CHAPTER TWELVE Tempered Nostalgia in Recent French Films on the ’68 Years JULIAN BOURG The representational heterogeneity of 1968 is self-evident. The events of that year were multiple; they advocated multiplicity, generated countless instant accounts, and have been interpreted and polemicized in a myriad of ways. Film is a fitting form for reckoning with the sixties as a whole and 1968 in particular not only because impressions of 1968 at the time and since have trafficked in images, and not only because film lends itself to capturing diverse temporalities and spaces, but also because of the simple fact that no one has stopped making films about “the ’68 years.” Where do we stand today in relation to 1968 with respect to film? I would like to discuss two films: Philippe Garrel ’s Les amants réguliers (Regular Lovers, 2005) and Christian Rouaud’s Lip, l’imagination au pouvoir (Lip: Imagination in Power, 2007).1 Both of these films return to les années soixante-huit (the ’68 years), that period in France that opened with the student and worker strikes of May–June 1968 and continued into the mid-1970s. Even against the backdrop of worldwide upheaval, the French events of May and June were noteworthy. Nowhere else did matters go so far. Beginning in the student milieu, the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe led to upward of ten million workers leaving or occupying their workplaces. The government of Charles de Gaulle experienced a shuddering crisis of confidence as the president dramatically left the country in late May for a military base in Germany to check on the loyalty of the army. Although the student-occupied Latin Quarter was cleared in June and special elections later that month strengthened de Gaulle, the events of 1968 were considered by many, as was said at the time, the “beginning of a long struggle,” a “breach” in the wall of conventional society, an opening of 328 JULIAN BOURG historical possibility that militant action would keep open and extend (figure 12.1).2 The late 1960s and early to mid-1970s saw an upswing of left-wing radicalism, the formation of new social movements, and the abrupt emergence of the French counterculture. This climate of radical social and political action began to taper off in the mid-1970s. The familiar tale of the May explosion, its immediate setback, and its continuing (if diminishing) echoes is a narrative often told from the perspective of the radical protagonists who lived through the events of 1968, those who “knew May” (ont connu mai). There are certainly other stories to tell about 1968 and the ’68 years besides those of young leftist militants and intellectuals—the accounts of the police, for instance, or rural populations who viewed circumFigure 12.1. Atelier Populaire des Beaux-Arts, Mai 68, début d’une lutte prolongée (May 68: Beginning of a long struggle), poster, May 1968. Nostalgia in Recent French Films on the ’68 Years 329 stances in Paris and elsewhere with suspicion. May 1968, however, has long maintained the iconicity it rapidly achieved. Representations and interpretations of the May events, whether those events have been celebrated or decried in historical memory, have held to a particular field of experience—Paris, street demonstrations, barricades, political microgroups, Third World revolutionary exuberance, the working class (real and imagined), the sexual revolution , drugs and the counterculture, and so forth. Although dynamic and multifarious itself, this field generated a relatively constant and strikingly limited iconography; one calls to mind, for example, the famous graffiti, poster art, and photographs of demonstrators and riot police. May 1968 has thus borne the weight of a paradox: exhaustive repetition and interpretation of a very local and specific set of circumstances.3 There is a tension between the stubborn solidity of “May ’68” as having transpired at a fixed time and place and the representational plurality the events (les événements) have inspired. The staggering supply of accounts and polemics—appearing in clusters around decennial anniversaries—as well as the numerous filmic and literary depictions of the ’68 years attest to the events’ supposedly inexhaustible and unsurpassed significance.4 Garrel’s and Rouaud’s films need to be placed first of all in this larger context. Cameras were rolling in May 1968. Although live radio broadcasts played a greater role than television in creating a sense of simultaneous experience, by the end of the...