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Bookmark this page1871 (1989)
Director: Ken McMullen
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
McMullen's film about the Paris Commune offers a stirring rendition of the 'Internationale' sung, at a moment of seeming defeat, by the actors in Ramborde's Theatre in Paris, as reactionary government forces close in to remove, as it were, the masses from the stage of history. McMullen depicts the events of those heady days - from the assassination of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, through the crazy Franco-Prussian war, to the crushing of the communards - as a farcical theatrical event, taking his cue, no doubt, from Marx's famous remarks about how history repeats itself (his words themselves repeated imperiously by a black Marx played by director Med Hondo). In and out of Ramborde's Theatre or the nearby Café Anglais, a gallery of historical cut-outs impersonates the various mighty forces at work in society. It's a grand, ambitious, three-act, sub-Brechtian affair, which exhibits the McMullen trademarks: a painterly eye, an unashamed taste for Big Ideas and allusive puns, and a tendency to lapse into obscurity and pretentiousness.Author: WH
Cast & crew
Director: Ken McMullen
Producer: Stewart Richards
Cast: Roshan Seth, John Lynch, Timothy Spall, Alexandre de Sousa, Maria de Medeiros, Ian McNeice, Ana Padrao, Jack Klaff, Dominique Pinon, Med Hondo, Lutz Becker full cast
Duration: 100 mins
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