Pop Goes the Revolution: French Cinema and May ’68

This spring BFI examines the cultural currents around ‘les évènements’ of May ’68 via the vibrant French cinema of that era. This turning point in European film history is illustrated with seminal titles such as The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée était en noir, 1967), Weekend (1967) and William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966).

In early 1968, the subtly subversive pop star Jacques Dutronc was all over the French airwaves with a sweet song eulogising his home town – Il est 5 heures, Paris s’éveille (It is 5am, Paris awakes). Within weeks, Paris awoke in a way that Dutronc, and few of his countrymen, could have foreseen as a minor flare-up at Nanterre University led to barricades across the capital. This season shows how the enfranchisement of youth in the mid-60s – whether through Jane Birkin breaking up a happy home in La Piscine (1969) or the dogmatic Jean Pierre Léaud and pop starlet Chantal Goya in Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966) – was turning the world on its head.
 
When it reached the tipping point of Nanterre, the conservative old world dramatically and violently attempted to reverse the trend. Even Cannes wasn’t spared in ‘68. When the culture minister André Malraux tried to fire the co-founder and head of the Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langois, the result was direct action. Louis Malle and Roman Polanski both immediately resigned from the festival jury while Godard and Truffaut burst into a screening and hung from the curtains to physically stop the festival from continuing. The tone of international cinema was noticeably bleaker for several years afterwards. Yet, while the repercussions of the political unrest continue to be debated, there was one concrete and positive result Henri Langois was re-instated.
 
All Power to the Imagination! 1968 and Its Legacies marks the creative resistance of a remarkable year, while placing its lessons in the context of our own times. From April to June and across London, this major season explores 1968 culture, politics and thought and their legacy manifestations in cinema, visual art, literature, music and activism.