Week 2/2025

For this first selection of 2025, we’ve chosen three films that deal with the apparent incommensurability of our private lives and political life. How to be with yourself and yours and take a position in this world? Maybe some of us just barely got through family holiday dinners and found a morsel of solace thinking our problems are nothing compared to something like your last hospital being burnt down. Even if internalized culpabilization of this kind gets nobody anywhere, let’s count our blessings nevertheless. Cinema, then. 

Horace Ové’s Pressure (1974) portrays a young Black Briton navigating being the only one of his Trinidadian immigrant family who was born in Britain. He finds himself under pressure from both the exigency of white bourgeois culture and his Black Panther older brother’s attempts at politicizing him. Hailed as the first Black British feature, it captured a hidden world. In an interview on the film, Ové said: “[Black Britons] weren’t being represented at that time. No one was dealing with what was going on in that world. What Pressure tried to do was to portray the experience of the Windrush generation, the kids who came with them and the kids born here.”

Cinema can frame multiple disparate realities in the same space, in the same length of time spent in the dark. Both Agnes Varda in La pointe courte (1955) and Johan Van der Keuken (JVDK) in De nieuwe ijstijd (1976) dealt with this experience of disproportion between the moving lives of families or lovers and the movement the world needs to change. Varda portrayed “a couple in crisis, not only between themselves, but in terms of their inability to connect with others.” She wanted us to see in her first film that “there’s no connection between social issues and private problems.” But JVDK’s work was perhaps just that, composing this dissonant connection anyway, without comparison.