1968 and Global Cinema ed. by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (review)

The intention of this ambitious book is to shift the conversation about the years around 1968 away from one of failure to an analysis of global film cultures. It is organized into two parts, the first part comprising ten articles with a national focus under the heading: "The Long Sixties: Cinematic New Waves." But as the first entry under this heading by Robert Stam carefully points out, all contributions want to move the discussion away from what is typically seen as waves emanating from an epicenter (e.g. the "Hot Summer of Paris 1968") to a different interpretation of the metaphorical waves as ones moving back and forth between what back then was called First, Second, and Third World. Each contribution carefully lays out what the "1968s" of each respective country signifies and how they were both influenced by other waves and set off waves of their own. Thus, the second part of the book, "Aftershocks," comprising another nine diverse contributions, sticking to the metaphor, might as well have been called "Ripples," and once more takes us around the globe in tracking radical filmmaking everywhere from France to Iran by way of India and other places.

Readers of this volume can choose what they want to get out of it: all contributions could be an entryway into the respective country's radical filmmaking cultures (and beyond); they could serve as a catalog of approaches to what radical forms of cinema meant in the respective context; they could serve as a starting point to explore the respective national cinematic tradition, as most contributions go beyond (both past and future of) the focus on 1968. Most importantly, as the editors rightly point out, it will move each reader away from our "Cold War fixation" (6) and redirect our attention to the specific, local relationship between cinema and radical politics. Immediately, each reader will find a renewed "interest in a period that has suffered from the discourse of failure" (of radical politics) in the shift to an analysis of global film culture. Thus, for example, the contributions in the book that touch on German film will put into question the obsession of German film with the 1967 police murder of Benno Ohnesorg as the starting point of any discourse about the German radical Left, and redirect our attention to what was going on in Iranian filmmaking and politics at this point in time (as the contribution by Sara Saljoughi does). For those familiar with German filmmaking it will come as a surprise that the contribution on radical German filmmaking is not about the New German Film (at one point in the book wrongly labelled New German Kino [30]), but on the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. And so it is with many contributions: Rather than focusing on what so far has been considered at the center of the respective national radical filmmaking culture, they pull us sideways to lesser-known practices. I am sure every reader at some point will have to admit 'I didn't know about this,' along with the frustration, in many cases, of not having easy access to what s*he reads about.

The book will definitely renew "interest in a period that has suffered from the discourse of failure," but by using this epitaph of a period the volume at the same time perpetuates it. The volume and its diverse contributions seem to argue that the radical political movements in each location have indeed vanished and that THE REVOLUTION did not happen, but that the various approaches to film associated with each generated some radical aesthetic and formal innovations. As I have argued elsewhere, there is no need to be so apologetic: in a review of Ingo Cornils's Writing the Revolution [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 110.4, Winter 2018, 701–3], I maintained that the quotations he adduces to serve as testament of the failure of 1968 can actually be...