Fundamental Questions

May ’68 began with protests at Naneterre where the student population had doubled from 1960 to 1968 without an increase in faculty or the physical campus. Students were protesting both the lack of resources and a plan to make exams even more important. Eventually, the protests spread to the Sorbonne, other universities, and cites, they insisted that the problem wasn’t simply the organization of the university system but of society itself.

As we examine specific details and incidents, we keep returning to fundamental questions:

- What is an education? What should an education be? What should it consist of?

- Does a person have a right to demand a certain type of education from the state? If so, why? If not, what type of education should the state want from its citizens?

- What is the importance of physical space in an education? The architecture of the building? The interior of the classroom? The neighborhood of the school itself?

- What is history? How does it get preserved?

- How does memory function?

- How do we evaluate a historical event?

- What does it mean to be part of a system?

- How can political change be effected?

- What is the nature of an image? How are images used, and what are their effects?

- After you protest against the state, what then?

- What’s the nature of authorship? Artistry?

- Is there anything that cannot be co-opted and sold?

The Walls - Joe

Without access to mainstream media – television, radio, and newspapers – students spread their ideas with graffiti, pamphlets, and posters. We’ve been looking at each of these, including original copies of L’Enrage, a proto “zine” of provocative cartoons.

At the Ecole des Beaux Arts, students turned the school into a “poster factory,” cranking out dozens, probably hundreds, of designs. These consisted of simple powerful graphics and pithy saying or slogans. A silhouette of a figure in a kepi, a symbol of DeGaulle, covers the mouth of a person and the saying is “Sois Jeune and Shut Up” (Be Young and Shut Up). The students plastered these posters throughout the area and city, and we’ve seen footage of them stopping buses (using a huge paper machie figure of DeGaulle) then covering the sides of them with posters.

Most of these posters have leftist political slogans, such as “Students and Workers Unite.” Several of them make use of graphics comparing De Gaulle and the older generation to Hitler and Nazis and turning the symbol of the Free French into a swastika. And there are many that warn against trusting the media, calling television and the press poison. The irony is that several of the main figures in the student movement, especially Daniel Cohn-Bendit were media savvy. They were composed, confident, articulate, intelligent, and photogenic. Cohn-Bendit would call press conferences, and even acknowledged that he was a “media darling.” When he is deported to Germany, where he held citizenship, posters appear with an image of his face with the sentiments “Nous sommes tous des Juifs et des Allemands” and “Nous sommes tous indesirables’.” (We are all German Jews; We are all undesirables).

Some of the posters make use of 1950s ads, appropriating slogans and images of well-known campaigns. Interestingly, the reverse dynamic then happens. Searching the database catalogue at the Musee de La Publicite, we discovered an ad campaign by the retailer E. LeClerc in 2005. It uses some of the iconic images of May 68, including one of a police shield, placing a bar code across it. One of the slogans of ’68 was “It is forbidden to forbid.” The LeClerc ad insists, “It is forbidden to forbid . . . low prices.”

Forum des Images

July 8, 2010

Paris is the city in which cinema is king, queen and any other relevant cultural royalty. Our discovery today was Forum des Images, in the redeveloped Les Halles, which unfortunately has been turned from the earthy French food market into just another suburban-looking mall. The hidden treasure in this arid multi-level pean to international commercialism is the Forum des Images, part of a three-cinema complex that has an extra dimension unknown in any American city that I am aware of: an archive of thousands of French feature films, documentaries, TV broadcasts, newsreels – anything capture on film or video that is French. We expected to find film footage of the “evenements” at the French Cinematheque, which was woefully deficient in this area. But we hit the research jackpot at the Forum, which had more than 90 specific films on May 1968, films we could only see at this specific archive. They are not available online, or anywhere else that we could find in Paris.

Turning out to prove our thesis about the malleability of the visual image, we saw identical footage of the protests outside the Sorbonne and throughout the Latin Quarter used for completely different purposes. One was in a propaganda film put out by the French government in support of President Charles De Gaulle by the Union for the Republic, portraying the protestors as anti-French anarchists who want to destroy the country and everything related to capitalism within it. Then we viewed one of the rare documentaries made by a student collective that used the exact same images of burning barricades and students fleeing the viciously wielded police batons to demonstrate their point that the state would tolerate no serious protest.

We also viewed several French newsreels, still shown in every French movie theater in the late 1960s, that alternated footage of “War in the Streets of Paris!” with fashion shows and footage of police motorcyclists training in the countryside. The irony that those “flics” would soon be chasing students down la Rue de St. Germain des Pres was not noted. The mainstream media had a common theme: the students were under the influence of dangerous foreigners like “the German citizen Daniel Cohn-Bendit,” who was shown literally driven out of France in a black police car. All the students were interested in, from this perspective, was anarchy and destruction, and the good Gaullists and reliable citizens of France were interviewed to agree that the protests were “une horreur,” and the sooner they were stopped, the better. We see housewives picking their way through the remnants of the burned out barricades on their way to market, and businessmen carefully guiding their bicycles and motorcycles over the abandoned grilles used to fortify the barricades. The message was clear: the true France called upon by De Gaulle in his “Viva la France!” national TV speech had no patience with this nonsense any more.

The manipulation of image, the incitement of fear and loathing by both sides (one against the students, the other against the state) proves the thesis we began with, that the true war was over the use of visual images and the development of potent meaning through the creation of an accessible narrative. Two different narratives, two different creators, two different outcomes, but only one triumphed. Guess which one.

Dale Pollock

Paving Stones - Joe

Finding their way blocked during one march, the students began digging up the streets which were paved with cobblestones. These they used to throw and to build barricades. In one photograph, they have formed a line much like a bucket brigade for a fire, but instead of water they are passing stones along.

The use of these stones to erect barricades tapped into the iconography and memory of the French revolution. The barricades were ineffective from a functional standpoint – they didn’t keep anyone out (and some were only thigh high) – but enormously effective from a symbolic one.

The “pavé” became an icon – the symbol of what has come to be called in France “les evenements.” One poster showed a stone and said “For those under 21, this is your ballot.” A photographer explained, “The camera is my ‘pavé’.” A famous slogan of the time said, “Sous les pavés, la plage.” This has been translated in different ways, although mainly “under the pavement, the beach,” but its basic metaphorical content suggest a more natural, even utopian, world underneath the concrete of modern industrial life.

Student protests happened all over the world in 1968, and the students often learned by watching one another. In Tokyo, later in the year, the students tried to break up the street and emulate “mai 68,” but the street was asphalt and didn’t break easily into chunks. By the early 1970s, much of the Latin Quarter too had been paved over.

You can occasionally buy “genuine” mai 68 pavés on eBay which say things like “this went through the windshield of my father’s car.” And, in 2008, to celebrate the 40^th anniversary, a famous chocolatier made a special edition “pavé” made of chocolate, praline, and nougat priced at 60 euros.

Photos - Joe

Some clichés become clichés because they’re true. An image can offer an emotional understanding of an event that a thousand words cannot. We read about “police brutality” and we know intellectually what that means, but in some photographs, like those of Gilles Caron, we feel it viscerally. He shows us how during the “night of the barricades,” a student has crawled under a bench. He has an arm held up to ward off a blow from a police baton. The police officer is stretching out to try to reach him. He must work hard to get to the student who only wants to get away. In another photograph, a woman lies prone bleeding as a police officer is in the middle of hitting her again. In a third, a student runs low to the ground trying to escape from a police officer racing to club him, his long baton held high.

In looking at the images of May 1968 on video and in the Maison de Europeene de La Photographie, I’ve been struck by several things. One is the clothes. These student “revolutionaries” wear ties, button-down shirts and dress shoes. They hurl stones in sport jackets. Twenty years later the photographer Dityvon publishes a collection of his photographs of the time, Impressions de Mai, and asks: Where’s the long-hair? Where are the bell bottom pants? He acknowledges that memory plays tricks. These students weren’t hippies. The photographs have the truth of the moment rather than what the moment has become in the popular imagination. The police also wear ties along with their helmets and riot goggles.

Another is the various ages on all sides. We tend to think of it as being all college students on one side and older people on the other. This wasn't the case. For one, the students were joined in the marches and protests by professors, people in the neighborhood, and high school teenagers. And, there were college students and college-aged people protesting against the protesters.

In another photo of Caron’s, a beautiful image of people sunbathing along the Seine becomes more evocative with its caption which explains it’s May 1968. As Auden’s poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” points out, there are always people close by to an event who don’t particularly care that it’s happening. A similarly striking image in the William Klein film Grands Soirs et Petits Matins, shows a man calmly reading a newspaper in a fourth floor apartment, and the camera pans down to show riot police walking the street.

Paris, Langlois, and May 1968 - Dale

We had a productive and magical day at the French Cinematheque. For the past several days, we have ventured all over Paris in search of visual records from the May 1968 “events” (les evenements, as they are known here): we have seen photographs, posters, and today, wonderful film footage by the experimental filmmaker and documentarian Chris Marker, and a largely unknown filmmaker, William Klein. This was the first moving image footage we viewed, and much of it was riveting – the size of the student and worker demonstrations, the pro-Gaullist counter-demonstrations, the police lobbing tear gas at the student as the students lob cobblestones at the police. It was literally a state of war for these crucial weeks that eventually led to the retirement of DeGaulle, but Georges Pompidou simply continued the Gaullist policies that had led to many of the protests. Marker makes it clear that these protests were part of a continuum that began with the anti-Vietnam War protests that began in Paris as early as 1966, and also part of an overall labor struggle that saw several strikes and protests at French auto factories in the 1960s.

The brutality of the French police in pursuing and beating students with their long and deadly batons is sobering, and far exceeds the police actions against students at Berkeley and Columbia University during the same period in the U.S.

This afternoon I viewed an original print of WAY DOWN EAST (D.W. Griffith, 1920) that was a combination of two original prints, one with French and German intertitles on some reels, and English intertitles on other parts. It is indicative of the amazing restoration work done by the Cinematheque, which resulted in the availability of not only classic films, but footage such as Klein’s filming of the student protests, which does not exist anywhere else in Paris, at least as far as we have seen. The Cinematheque is unlike any film archives in the U.S.. in the overwhelming scope of its preservation activities, from small documentaries to film classics, and is an inspiration and a wonderful model for the UNCSA Moving Image Archives.

On Sunday July 4 we forewent any celebration of our national holiday, and instead spent several hours in the Maison Europeanne de La Photographie, which had a treasure trove of photography books documenting the May 1968 events. (All you have to do is mention “Mai soixante-huite” to any person and they know immediately what you are referring to.) Joe will discuss these books in more detail on his blog, but they are like war photographs, capturing the excitement and brutality of the moment, and it is hard to believe that these took place on the calm, placid and highly commercialized avenues of St. German des Pres and the Latin Quarter 42 years ago: barricades burning in the streets, tear gas swirling and forming clouds in the black night, students hurling café chair legs and cobblestones while running wildly to escape the onrush of CRC security police. All the resentment the police and the conservative citizens of Paris is obvious in the severe beatings to any passerby unfortunate enough to end up in the path of these police, and these images will stay with us for a long time.

This was possibly the first urban insurrection to be fully documented in still photographs, moving film, TV images and the incredible anti-government posters turned out by the dozens by the students of the Ecole Des Beaux Artes. We will be going to the Bibliotheque Nationale to look for original editions of these posters, along with several more museums.

This research experience has exceeded our expectations on every level, and we greatly look forward to assessing our research upon our return and preparing for the presentation we will give at the Kenan Institute, our generous funder, and the class we will jointly teach in Fall 2011.