{"id":7724,"date":"2018-02-02T14:59:21","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T22:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=7724"},"modified":"2018-02-02T15:00:29","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T23:00:29","slug":"review-intense-now-revisits-drama-1968-france-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/02\/02\/review-intense-now-revisits-drama-1968-france-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: \u2018In the Intense Now\u2019 Revisits the Drama of 1968 in France and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><code><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SNtArvpjI2s\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/code><br \/>\nNO INTENSO AGORA Directed by Jo\u00e3o Moreira Salles Documentary, History 2h 7m<\/p>\n<p>By A. O. SCOTT JAN. 30, 2018 (NYTimes.com)<\/p>\n<p>The \u201960s \u2014 1968 in particular \u2014 are so encrusted with legend, nostalgia and pop-historical clich\u00e9 that it may seem unlikely for a new movie to yield much insight. But those dreading 50th-anniversary greatest-hits medleys will find solace, enlightenment and surprise in Jo\u00e3o Moreira Salles\u2019s \u201cIn the Intense Now,\u201d a bittersweet, ruminative documentary essay composed of footage from the era accompanied by thoughtful, disarmingly personal voice-over narration.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the images \u2014 and virtually the only ones in color \u2014 come from Mr. Salles\u2019s own archives. His family was living the expatriate life in Paris, traveling home to Brazil during vacations. His mother, an arts journalist, took a trip to China in the early days of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, filming ancient monuments, smiling schoolchildren and ubiquitous portraits of Mao Zedong.<\/p>\n<p>The Chinese interludes, along with amateur film from Czechoslovakia, punctuate a main narrative devoted to the \u201cevents of May\u201d in France. That story, of a student uprising followed by a general strike, has been told many times before. The sights associated with it \u2014 of rioters hurling cobblestones at the police, of whimsical graffiti, of occupied factories and the imperious visage of President Charles de Gaulle \u2014 are as familiar as pictures of Woodstock or the moon landing. But Mr. Salles offers both fresh visual material and a gently revisionist interpretation of events.<\/p>\n<p>The story of May 1968 in France is partly the story of Daniel Cohn-Bendit \u2014 called Danny the Red for his hair and his radical politics \u2014 one of the celebrity militants of the time. He was the most charismatic of the student leaders, and an articulate spokesman for the concerns of a generation fed up with bureaucracy, conformity and a sclerotic political system.<\/p>\n<p>They forged an improbable, temporarily effective alliance with industrial workers, a convergence that many thought heralded a new revolutionary coalition. But Mr. Salles, with the benefit of hindsight and an astute ability to analyze the documentary record, throws cold water on this romantic notion. The witty slogans \u2014 \u201cBe realistic, demand the impossible\u201d; \u201cThe walls have the floor\u201d; \u201cUnderneath the paving-stones, the beach!\u201d \u2014 had the punch of advertising copy. The street demonstrations galvanized the news media and the intelligentsia, but the public craving for order and normalcy was deeper than they or the students realized. And while the students claimed to desire liberation from consumer society, many of the workers wanted better access to it.<\/p>\n<p>The Prague Spring was an unsuccessful revolution of a different kind, ended by the military intervention of the Soviet Union in August. In China, by contrast, the revolution appeared to be successful, but the full dimensions of its cruelty were not yet visible to the few visitors, like Mr. Salles\u2019s mother, who were allowed into the country. Mr. Salles, who seems broadly sympathetic to the traditions of the international left (his brother is Walter Salles, director of \u201cThe Motorcycle Diaries\u201d), nonetheless disdains the easy sentimentality of lost causes. He elucidates, above all, the ironic dimension of his film\u2019s title, imposing an elegiac, gently pessimistic tone on the energy and immediacy of what he sees and shows.<\/p>\n<p>What he reveals, perhaps against his own intentions, is the inevitable aestheticization of the past. The anonymous demonstrators in Paris and Prague, and the people holding the cameras, were caught up in the drama of the present, rushing furiously toward a future they could not comprehend. Those of us living in that future notice their clothes and cigarettes, the beauty of the 8- and 16-millimeter cinematography, the look of cities before Starbucks and McDonald\u2019s. For a few hours, we are caught up in the intensity of then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NO INTENSO AGORA Directed by Jo\u00e3o Moreira Salles Documentary, History 2h 7m By A. O. SCOTT JAN. 30, 2018 (NYTimes.com) The \u201960s \u2014 1968 in particular \u2014 are so encrusted with legend, nostalgia and pop-historical clich\u00e9 that it may seem unlikely for a new movie to yield much insight. But&#8230; <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/02\/02\/review-intense-now-revisits-drama-1968-france-beyond\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7724"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7726,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7724\/revisions\/7726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}