Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: The Year 01 (1969)

By: börek - May 1st, 2018  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 20 May 2018, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema.
L’AN 01 1969 MAY 68 Directed by Jacques Doillon, Gébé, Alain Resnais and Jean Rouch. 90 minutes. In French with English subtitles.
Doors open at 20:00. Intro starts at 20:30

This is a collective film, where each of the filmmakers worked separately, but all of them were influenced by a single source—a utopian comic strip devised by the legendary cartoonist Gébé. It’s a farce with a free-wheeling avant-garde approach to cinema, embracing a ludic spirit of subversion. Although this satire is loaded with humour, it is also very ‘engaged’ and can be compared to the experimental ciné-tract short movies that were shot on the barricades. It is unstructured in its form, and changes style as it drifts along, touching on issues connected to ’68—the ecology, rejection of authority, challenges to growth and productivity, anti-war, free love, pollution, communal living, rejection of private property and demolishing the idea of forced labor.

This flick is a fable, and one that proposes with gleeful abandonment the following utopian scenario: all of a sudden, all the ordinary people throughout the world stopped working and money becomes worthless. Once everything has come to a grinding halt, we could bring back—reluctantly—only the services and products we really need. What follows is a wide-ranging series of whimsical sketches, a bit like a Monty Python narrative, of how different people react to such a situation. For example, the contribution of anthropologist Jean Rouch is documentary-like and harpoons the domination of northern countries over the south, and the so-called first world over the third world—something that is still alive and kicking today.

The tone is festive and all of the passages are marked with the cutting-edged humour of Gébé. Among the cast of actors are illustrators Georges Wolinski and Jean Cabut, who were both were killed in the January 7th, 2015 terrorist attack on the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Also on hand are several actors that would only later become well-known… Gérard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere and Miou-Miou.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to play a movie, let us know: joe [at] squat [dot] net

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Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Moi, un noir (Jean Rouch, 1958)

By: börek - March 1st, 2018  Filed under: Filmavond


Sunday March 18th 2018, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Moi, un noir (1958). Directed by Jean Rouch. 73 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

Today the name of ethnographer Jean Rouch is barely even whispered in cinema history, which just goes to show that history is always recorded by the winners. Today the winner is Hollywood… but perhaps tomorrow an influence like Jean Rouch could shatter the glass menagerie of American filmmaking. Who knows?

In this cinematic gem Jean Rouch traveled to Abidjan, on the Ivory Coast of Africa, with no predetermined concept. He wanted to make a film with the local people, to record their everyday lives and their dreams. So Rouch starts to hang out in Treichville – one of the poorest neighborhoods of Abidjan – and spends a week with immigrants from Niger who have come to the big city hoping to become successful. Now here is where the real importance of this film begins to shine… these down and out people are doing hard labor (for us here in Europe) and trying to scrape enough money together to buy a bowl of soup, but have re-named themselves after stars in western movies. One calls himself Tarzan, another Edward G. Robinson and another is Eddy Constantine. One even plays an FBI Agent. At night they hang out in bars and try to drink away their misery, and when they go to sleep we follow their dreams of an idealized world. The movie then submerges into poetic mode as we enter these dream-sequences.

The result is a cinematic fusion called “ethnofiction.” Director Jean Rouch had an explosive impact on cinema back in the 60s, and many in the French New Wave, like Jean-Luc Godard, would name him as one of their major influences. Jean Rouch took narrative cinema and fused it with anthropology and sociology: sometimes his films were documentaries tinted with fiction, and at other times they were fiction tinted with documentary.

The magic of this movie is how it nails down the way imperialism works today… less with guns and tanks, and more with the overtaking of dreams. It is clear the local dreams of these people in Africa have been hijacked by foreigners – so what we are talking about is a colonization of the subconscious. I daresay the same is true in Europe today, which has been robbed of its own dreams and replaced by those of the Yankees. Another rare screening of a neglected masterpiece.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to play a movie, let us know: joe [at] squat [dot] net

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