Zero to '68

Walter Reade celebrates the year that shook up the world.

This year, 1968 is officially middle-aged. Four decades ago, student- and worker-led protests nearly brought France to a halt; unrest at Columbia and other universities were only part of the huge change in youth culture taking place not just in the U.S. but around the globe. What is the legacy of that legendary year? Walter Reade’s essential series invites deep appreciation but never nostalgia.

Stateside, it was—to borrow the title of Emile de Antonio’s remarkable 1969 doc on Vietnam—the year of the pig. “Revolution has come! (Off the pig!) / “Time to pick up the gun! (Off the pig!),” a group of mostly female Black Panthers chants in the 1968 short Off the Pig (Black Panther). (Panther Kathleen Cleaver makes a notable appearance at the beginning of Zabriskie Point (1970), Antonioni’s misguided, pop-exploding take on U.S. youth.) And in Medium Cool (1969), in which Haskell Wexler’s fictional critique of journalistic practices becomes tangled up with the real, bloody events at the ’68 Democratic convention in Chicago, shouts of “Pigs eat shit!” precede the furious beatdowns the cops administer.

To offset the brutality of the pigs, revolutionary porking abounds. Yugoslav Dusan Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) pays tribute to Wilhelm Reich, who devoted his life to studying the potent life energy of the orgasm. On the other hand, It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse but the Society in Which He Lives (also from ’71), the first feature by Rosa von Praunheim, Germany’s chief lavender menace, exhorts Berlin’s faggotry to go beyond the quick gratification of tearoom tricks and embrace a more radical cause: honesty. “The most important thing is to admit we’re gay,” a thickly Teutonic voice cries out before sounding this even more utopian, post-Stonewall call: “Let’s work together with the blacks and the women’s liberation movement.”

For dashed revolutionary hopes, the student radicals in Godard’s La Chinoise (also included in Film Forum’s “Godard’s ’60s” program, which begins May 2) from 1967 seem to anticipate the blunders of insurrections a year before the May ’68 uprising. “Maybe ’68 turned you off,” one character says in Alain Tanner’s extraordinary Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), a droll paean to those in their thirties trying to reconcile the failures of their youthful dreams. These defeats are examined on a far more epic scale in Robert Kramer and John Douglas’s Milestones (1975), which, quite frankly, is one of the most amazing films I’ve ever seen. Combining documentary, staged scenes and often a fascinating mixture of the two, this 200-minute dirge follows 50 people—commune dwellers, blind potters, draft dodgers—who ache with the unfilled promises of ’60s radicalism. When one woman screams to her boyfriend, “You refuse to acknowledge what my feelings are!” it eerily anticipates our current political state: one of enraged narcissism. The personal is no longer political—it’s simply solipsism.

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