For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema

Nicole Brenez
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 50, Numbers
1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 197-201 (Article)
Published by Wayne State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/frm.0.0045

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/frm/summary/v050/50.1-2.brenez.html

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For an Insubordinate
(or Rebellious)
History of Cinema
Nicole Brenez
To start off, I disagree entirely with the premise: not only was May 1968
filmed, considerably and well, but the period unleashed some of the most
magnificent initiatives in the history of cinema in relation both to form and
practical organization. For ten years at the Cinmathque Franaise I have
devoted one part of my programs to the exploration of filming by Collectives, of engaged films, and all of 2008 has been dedicated to a series May
68 International (Mexico, Argentina, Japan, USA, UK, Italy . . . ), rich in
discovery. The period 19651974 is probably the most fertile and most exciting in the history of forms and cinematic propositions, a veritable aesthetic
volcano. This does not make the questions you pose for the present any less
pertinent, since what the most interesting contemporary cinephilia picks
up in part are the critical gestures that led the revolutionary explosions of
the 1960s everywhere in the world: collective work, critical examination,
emergence of alternative and autonomous cultures. The sites of exchange,
of pirating, the blogs, in the work of some, extend the values defended by
what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino had theorized under the term
third cinema, essentially for what concerns counterinformation: think of
the work of Indymedia.
But it is necessary also to develop a cinephilic counter-information.
The principal battle concerns the present: the production of valuable
images is such that no critic, even the indefatigable Jonathan Rosenbaum,
no historian, no director of festival can take account of the cinematic production of a given time. Everywhere in the real and virtual worlds leap out
propositions about the cinema, even as the history of past cinema remains
largely to establish. I believe that there has never been as much work for
cinephiles as today: work on the corpus of the past and present, work on
Framework 50, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 197201.
Copyright 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

Nicole Brenez
the methods of observation, of collecting, of conservation, of analysis, and
so on and on.
We can cite several examples. In terms of corpus, an important initiative has been that of Alexis Tioseco in 2005 with the site www.criticine.com,
which charts day after day the contours of cinemas of southeast Asia, beginning with the Philippines. In terms of analytic methods, one can only salute
still and forever the magnificent site directed by Adrian Martin, Helen Bandis, and Grant McDonald, www.rouge.com.au, which maintains a permanent
concern for the internationalization of critical paths/approaches. In terms
of conservation/patrimony, the site www.ubu.com/film, specializing in the
avant-gardes, represents a cinephiles dream. And then there are all the blogs,
the sites of artists or individual cinephiles. I will cite only two, both exciting:
that of the very independent and solitary Marcel Hanoun, who, in a unique
move, has placed all his films online: www.marcel-hanoun.com; and that of
the great stylist Peter Whitehead, www.nohzone.net, which is an art object in
itself and presents the electronic material from which will come his next film,
Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts.
The phenomenal pimping of cinema by capitalism since its birth has
formed four to six generations of spectators and we find ourselves before a
Himalaya of images which constitutes without doubt the greatest modern collection of banalities.1 A generation later, no visible improvement: a certain
number of poorly informed spectators believe still that Titanic (US, 1997) by
James Cameron is a more important film than A Luta Continua (MZ, 1976),
an amazing short film shot by Asdrubal Rebelo and Bruno Muel with the
Angolan people in struggle, which amounts more or less to believing that
some samples of wallpaper are more important that the writings of Arthur
Rimbaud. Since the books and accounts of Guy Hennebelle, the history of
cinema of armed struggles, guerrillas, and revolutionary combats is no more
than just isolated initiatives, like those for example of Alain Weber2 or yours
on the films of fighters in the Spanish Civil War or the Sandinistas.
The history of cinema resistant to an industrial perspective remains
entirely to be written. Today, cinephiles throughout the world find each other
and group together easily. One might even say that geographical distance
favors mental closeness, for it smoothes the personality quirks or territorial
conflicts that often characterize local chapels/congregations. Speaking personally, with my friends and my students, I feel close to cinephiles whom I will
perhaps never meet, such as Mubarak Ali and his blog with the elegant title
www.supposedaura.blogspot.com, or the shock trio that runs www.fromtheclouds.blogspot.com, From the Clouds to the Resistance, Andy Rector,
Gabe Klinger, and Zach Campbell, and through them, the rhizome of links
they have established. Together, for those who care, they are able, we are able,
to establish this rebellious and autonomous history, on a large scale, for whose
theoretical and historical foundations the texts of Auguste Blanqui, Walter
Benjamin, Malcolm X, the Weather Underground, Howard Zinn, and the

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books of Amos Vogel, Cinema as a Subversive Art, or Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is
. . . , provide the practical literary models. Not only a history of the defeated
whose tombs we must rediscover, as the admirable film of John Gianvito,
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (US, 2007) has just done, but also a history
of free and living creatorsand I write this even as the generation of engaged
cineastes born at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of 1930s are still
alive and working: Rene Vautier, Marcel Hanoun, Raynonde Carasco, and
of course Jean-Luc Godard, among others. The task is as formidable as our
opportunity to turn upside down the criteria used in the history of cinema.
Here, in a programmatic way, is an engaged look at cinema (which is not
the only one that needs to be worked on but the most obscure and repressed,
perhaps), the beginning of a list of cineastes who have participated in a revolutionary guerrilla movement or a resistance struggle in the maquis, with a gun,
with a camera, or with both at the same time. In the universe of the cinema
of domination, they have broken the siege, they have succeeded in a magisterial breakthrough, they have refused the destructive division between the
combatant function and the poetic function; they are these men in struggle
announcing the true meaning of their struggle in their own words.3 You are
one of the few who knew the first, so you know well, Jonathan Buchsbaum,
that the less familiar the name, the more important it is.
Armand Guerra
Henri Sirolle
Adrien Porchet
Flix Marquet
Ramon de Banos
Pablo Weinschenk
Antonio Garcia
Mateo Santos
Jacinto Toryho
Juan Palleja
Angel Lescarboura
Louis Frank
Clemente Pia
Jose Gaspar
Antonio Polo
Angel Garcia Verches
Joaquin Giner
Adolfo Aznar
Carlos Martinez Baena
Roman Oliveras
Alvah Bessie
Dziga Vertov
Alexandre Medvedkine

Jacques-Bernard Brunius
Giorgio Agliani
Paolo Gobetti
Mario Bernardo
Gianni Toti
Lionel Rogosin
Edouard de Laurot
Joris Ivens
Chris Marker
Ren Vautier
Roger Pic
Jacques Charby
Mario Marret
Yann Le Masson
Pierre Clment
Armand Gatti
Jos Massip
Jesus Diaz
Humberto Sols
Julio Garca Espinosa
Toms Gutirrez Alea
Manuel Octavio Gmez
Humberto Arenal

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Nicole Brenez
Santiago lvarez
Orlando Jimenez Leal
Saba Cabrera
Ricardo Vega
Helvio Soto
Fernando Solanas
Octavio Getino
Fernando Birri
Mario Handler
Jorge Sanjins
Oscar Soria
Antonio Eguino
Luis Espinal
Miguel Littin
Hector Oliveira
Osvaldo Bayer
Patricio Guzman
Ali Djenaoui
Mahmoud Fadel
Maamar Zitouni
Othman Merabet
Mourad Ben Rais
Salah Ed Dine Senoussi
Kharoubi Ghaouti Mokhtar
Abdelkader Hassena
Slimane Ben Semane
Karl Gass
Nars Guenifi
Mustapha Badie
Guy Chalon
Philippe Durand
Olga Poliakoff
Jacques Panijel
Yacef Saadi
Pierre Nelli
Ahmed Rachedi
Mohamed Slim Riad

Ahmed Lallem
Marceline Loridan
Jean-Pierre Sergent
Marcel Trillat
Asdrbal Rebeleo
Gary Garabedian
Djamal Chanderli Yamina
Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina
Khaled Hamada
Mustapha Abou Ali
Tewfik Salah
Borhan Alaoui
Manfred Fuchs
Nana Mahomo
Hany Jawhaharijja
Christian Ghazi
Heiny Srour
Jean-Michel Humeau
Jean-Louis Ughetto
Fouad Touhamy
Jocelyne Saab
Gordian Troeller
Marie-Claude Deffarge
Jan Lindquist
Lionel NGakane
Phela NDeba
Arnold Antonin
Ben Dupuy
Keramat Daneshian
Rafig Pooya
Rogrio Sganzerla
Paul Leduc
Diego de la Texera
Carlos Alvarez
Humbert Rios
Carlos Flores
Guillermo Cahn

All the filmmakers of the Collectives for Liberation, and so many others, are
still ignored.
Nicole Brenez teaches Cinema Studies at the University of Paris-1/Panthon-Sorbonne
and, since 1996, has curated the avant-garde film sessions of the Cinmathque franaise. She has also curated film series in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York,

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Tokyo, Vienna, London, and Madrid. Her books include Shadows de John Cassavetes (Nathan, 1995), De la Figure en gnral et du Corps en particulier.
Linvention figurative au cinma (De Boeck Universit, 1998), Abel Ferrara
(University of Illinois Press, 2007), Traitement du Lumpenproletariat par le
cinma davant-garde (Sguier, 2007), Cinmas davant-garde (Cahiers du
cinma, 2007), and Abel Ferrara. Le Mal mais sans fleurs (Cahiers du cinma,
2008). She is the editor or coeditor of Potique de la couleur. Une histoire du
cinma exprimental (Auditorium du Louvre, 1998), Jeune, dure et pure. Une
histoire du cinma davant-garde et exprimental en France (Cinmathque
franaise/Mazzotta, 2001), La Vie nouvelle/nouvelle Vision (Leo Scheer, 2004),
Cinma/Politique Srie 1 (Labor, 2005), Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006), and Jean Epstein: Bonjour Cinma und andere
Schriften zum Kino (Vienna, FilmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2008). She contributes regularly to Trafic, Cahiers du cinma, and Rouge.

Notes
1. Marguerite Duras, Du livre au film, in Des femmes de Musidora, Paroles . . . elles
tournent (Paris: ditions des femmes, 1976), 82.
2. Alain Weber, Cinma(s) franais, 190039. Pour un monde diffrent (Paris: Sguier,
2002).
3. Masao Adachi, in Arme rouge-Front Populaire de Libration Palestinien: Dclaration
de guerre mondiale (Sekigun-P.F.L.P.-Sekai Senso Sengen) de Masao Adachi ( Japan/
Palestine, 1971). We use here the English version by Mio Matsumoto, available
at www.bordersphere.com.

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