AT THE MOVIES
Cri de Coeur
The Revolution Will Be Televised
| La Commune First Run/Icarus films |
The two reporters, both clutching microphones and staring earnestly into the camera, crouch behind the barricades and whisper questions to the soldiers. "Can you tell us what's happening now?" The sound of gunfire pops overhead. The soldiers reload their weapons. A ragged private, young and long-haired, leans toward the microphone and, smiling, recounts the day's exploits. They have held off the loyalists all morning and will fight to the death.
The reporters could be embedded journalists in Iraq, but they are not. They are covering an insurrection of Parisian proletarians. The year is 1871.
A new film by the iconoclastic British director Peter Watkins, La Commune (Paris, 1871), tells the story of the people's uprising that followed France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. As anarchy and poverty reigned in the French capital, a group of workers and radical intellectuals set up a socialist regime that lasted for two months until government troops, exiled to Versailles, conquered Paris and massacred more than 20,000 people involved with the utopian experiment. In portraying this exhilarating historical moment in an intricate six-hour-long reenactment, Watkins allows himself one major anachronism in order to make a point about our world today. His 1871 has television and, more importantly, television news. The cameras follow closely as hundreds of actors play out the commune's rise and fall, filming its heady moments — the communards repeatedly singing "La Marseillaise" and screaming Vive la Commune! The cameras also cover long, heated ideological debates about women's role in the new society and the distribution of wealth.
The story is, in fact, told by two competing news agencies. Versailles TV is the French national network, meant to be a parody of mainstream news channels. The anchor is a dour and dandyish aristocrat in a bow tie who reads the official version of the news in a monotone. His newscasts are announced by a familiar jingle, and the newsroom is a white antiseptic box. A screaming pundit often accompanies him, arguing the loyalist position.
The other media source is Commune TV, a low-budget guerrilla operation run by two earnest young proletarian journalists. Most of the movie is seen through their broadcasts, in which they run around the neighborhood interviewing the revolutionaries at the barricades and in the occupied town hall as well as the bourgeois opponents of the new regime sitting in church or in their shops. To the Commune TV journalists, reporting means simply approaching all the members of the commune and bluntly asking, "What are you doing?" As you'd imagine, their broadcasts, and the movie, are filled with long political rants and emotional cris de coeur. The Versailles TV correspondent, venturing Geraldo-like into the streets disguised in a fake moustache, is eventually attacked by a crowd of skeptics who believe he will manipulate their words and images. The Commune TV correspondents, on the other hand, are embraced. This may be due largely to their abstention from any aggressive interviewing, analysis of what has been said, or critique of the commune's insufficiencies. Instead, they endeavor simply to act as funnels for the public's frantic expression. In this, they set themselves apart from the mainstream. As one man says, approaching the Commune TV pair for the first time, "Are you the rich or poor man's television?"
And this seems to be the point Watkins is trying to make about mainstream media, that it is mostly a rich man's tool, intent on imposing and upholding the status quo. It is a monolith that does not permit dissent. In an interview in London's The Guardian he stated that "there has been an accumulation of global media power with no accountability that is not only not being challenged but is not even being debated." The argument is not new, but Watkins takes a creative approach to elucidating it.
Commune TV can be read as the director's idea of an alternative. While the government network is detached and authoritative, the renegade station is as collaborative and decentralized as possible. The film is a mosaic of voices. People, in this world, just talk without being edited or filtered. The movie's excessive length can be chalked up to this principle. But after sitting in a theater for six hours watching Watkins's exhausting vision, the answer to the question whether this is a realistic alternative becomes obvious. You can feel it in your sleeping limbs and hungry stomach. Letting everyone have his or her say takes time. In the real world, the hours upon hours of sweaty-faced impassioned debate would be reduced to fifteen-second sound bites. Vive la Revolution! Which is precisely Watkins's critique. Still, his solution doesn't feel viable. The extreme democracy that La Commune proposes for the broadcast medium seems to be a recipe for redundancy and tediousness.
Watkins disagrees, and says so in a written text that appears halfway through his film, in which he argues that the only reason he was denied state television funds for this project was that his proposal was too radical; the French government was threatened by his vision of replacing the little man in the rectangular box with "the people." It's possible. More likely, what Watkins perceived as democracy, television executives perceived simply as cacophony.
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