Resumen de From prophecy to pastiche - (mis)representing may 1968 on screen: Postmodern perspectives from godard to Bertolucci and hazanavicius
This paper seeks to engage with depictions in European cinema (including one debatable prediction) of the Paris events of May 1968, offering a comment on their stylistic variety as well as their ostensibly disparate themes before attempting to offer a sketch of their ideological proximity as ‘postmodern’ artefacts. Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) will, firstly, help to set the context and will be examined for its colourful ‘pop-art’ perspective on the dormant revolutionary fervour in the late-1960s milieu of Nanterre University, displaying both its early ‘postmodern’ style and its unlikely prophecy of the events to come. Whilst the more-recent films to be analysed – The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) and Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017) - will also be considered in relation to postmodernist theory but, in particular, to the complimentary notions of ‘nostalgia film’ and ‘historical amnesia’ (Jameson, 1991; 1998) in order to diagnose their ideological function of reducing the May ’68 events in the 21st Century to the harmless, playful and passive images of a seemingly-now-distant past. Bertolucci’s The Dreamers renders the May events as ‘nostalgic’ backdrop to the sexually experimental adventures of a student ménage-à-trois while in Hazanavicius’s Le Redoutable the world-historical upheaval provides the comical context in which the spectacles of a fictive Jean-Luc Godard are continually and repeatedly broken. This paper will argue that it is such a representation – the rendering of the cataclysmic events into purely nostalgic or even comic imagery - which serves to eviscerate the genuinely revolutionary potential of May ’68 and to, instead, repackage it as a merely passive, superficial and, at best, jovial backdrop to fictional narrative. In addition, the events of May ’68 as a specific focus for the historical context of a postmodern cinema proves to be particularly curious as much postmodernist theory has taken as its starting-point the perceived failure of the May ’68 moment. Such a discussion seeks to contribute to, and further enhance, the debate on the complex (or even paradoxical) relationship between postmodernism and History.
