Count me in: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, student and anarchist, photographed at a demonstration in May 1968. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
I was pleased to read Michael Billington this week drawing further attention to the Belarus Free Theatre. I was lucky enough to interview them at a recent show, in Soho, on their ever politically-vulnerable tour. Not only was I blown away by their enthusiasm and humour in the face of overt oppression but by the ways in which their play Being Harold Pinter expressed their feelings of dissatisfaction to the audience in such an immediate and uncanny way.
With the words and actions of the Free Theatre still fresh in my mind, this month I've been looking out for further explorations of protest in cultural events. These wishes were half-answered in the futile journey of the Olympic torch, and the BFI, Curzon, Barbican, and Renoir cinemas in London have provided more concise offerings. This week marked the beginning of the All Power to the Imagination festival celebrating the 40th anniversary of "les evenements" of May 1968 and its effects on European and American film. The programme covers films from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Britain, with discussions on everything from Walter Benjamin to the Beatles' white album in locations across London, Leeds, Glasgow and Berlin.
The festival began with with Francois Truffaut's thriller The Bride Wore Black (1968) a film with obvious links to new wave cinema of the late 1960s. The film contains a subtle anti-gun protest as well as a direct homage to Hitchcock - perhaps to its detriment. It follows Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) on her mission to seek revenge on those who murdered her husband on the day of her wedding, leading to a series of ingenious attempts to kill those offenders. Though a witty dissection of 1960s European masculinity, the film never seems to reach the intensity of a classic Hitchcock thriller and its relationship with anything remotely revolutionary is tenuous.
Luckily, unlike some "revolutionary retrospectives", this festival line-up appears to be taking a more holistic approach to its curation rather than just following the French new wave path. One of the most common downfalls of similar retrospectives is a regression into smug romanticising, breeding contemporary complacency. Therefore as a precautionary move I'll probably be avoiding yet another Malcolm McLaren discussion on the avant-garde and 70s punk culture, preferring instead to go and see The Fall by Peter Whitehead and the Pasolini film Theorem. Have I made the right decision?
