Avant-garde Cinemas

By Nicole Brenez

pp. 51-2

Translated from the French

Anticipating or accompanying political struggles

Everywhere that there was repression, there was resistance in images and sound, sometimes at the risk of the filmmakers’ (or film critics’) lives, as was the tragic case of Raymundo Gleyzer, Michèle Ray or Michèle Firk, cut down or assassinated for their ideas and their ideals. Remarkable also are the filmmakers today who accompany the oppressed without any political organisation to support them, in the manner of Laura Waddington filming alongside undocumented immigrants or Jean-Gabriel Leynaud or Jérôme Schlomoff and François Bon, alongside the homeless. A prejudice (very useful so as to refuse to consider a work) would have it, that engaged cinema, caught in the material urgencies of History, is indifferent to aesthetic questions. This is a pitifully shallow conception of its formal demands, since interventionist cinema, on the contrary, only exists by asking fundamental cinematographic questions; why make an image, which one, and how? With and for whom? Be it the image of an event (the death of a man, a war, a massacre, a struggle, an encounter…), how to show it, in what context to put it in perspective? What other images does it oppose? In regard to History, what are the missing images and what will be the indispensable images? To whom should we give a voice, and how to make one’s voice heard if it is refused? Why or in other words, what story do we want?

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