Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 11

Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 11

This week’s selection chooses a series of springtime portraits of the 1960s, centred on spoken testimonies. In each of the selected films, a sense of time seems to revolve around the dreams, fears and hopes that are being voiced before the camera. A question about the future becomes a pretext to talk about the worries of the present. These films become, thus, intimately connected through different though equally prescient articulations of happiness.

Le joli mai (Chris Marker & Pierre Lhomme, 1963)
Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme roam around the streets of Paris to find out what the city looks and sounds like in spring. In Le joli mai, filmed in the “first springtime of peace” (after the Algerian War for Independence had just officially ended), Parisians address the camera through a veil of blissful ignorance that’s exposed by Marker and Lhomme’s often erratic questioning. Nevertheless, a strong sense of sympathy underlies these encounters. In a city that’s increasingly caught by a nascent metropolitan loneliness and the fractures between old and new, the film achieves a sense of equality between the city dwellers briefly connecting all these disparate faces.

Hitler, connais pas (Bertrand Blier, 1963)
In Bertrand Blier’s film the scene drastically shifts in favour of the very controlled, almost sterile setting of the film studio. Hitler, connais pas starts from the premise of an unrepresentative study of French youths. Yet one cannot escape the impression that the words we hear mirror the aspirations, beliefs and worries of countless others. Again, the title of the film points to a certain sense of political apathy: their minds and hearts are clearly disconnected from the past and rooted firmly in present experiences. But once again, a sense of resistance reveals itself behind the veil of political apathy through the articulation of the future and the everyday. It becomes clear that the spring of ’68 was already simmering underneath the words and gestures in both Le joli mai and Hitler, connais pas.

Elles (Ahmed Lallem, 1966)
In Ahmed Lallem’s Elles, the young girls of Algeria struggle to formulate the terms of their happiness. Their articulations clash with patriarchal ones, aided by their defiant smiles and gestures. Their words, in turn, spring from the exact opposite of political apathy. Instead, their struggle is all the more political since it stems from their desire to spend the time of their lives freely. Ahmed Lallem would later make Algériennes, 30 ans après (1995), revisiting some of the characters in Elles. Together they form a portrait of dreams and aspirations, but also of lost hopes and might-have-beens.

Le joli mai is available on LaCintetek, Allociné, ARTE Boutiqueand UniversCiné.
Hitler, connais pas is available on ARTE Boutique, UniversCiné, CANAL + and Allociné.
Ellesis available on La Cinémathèque française.

Online Selection
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01 Feb 2021 - 07 Feb 2021