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