“Cinema in the Hands of the - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

“Cinema in the Hands of the
People”: Chris Marker, le
Medvedkin Group, et le
Potential of Militant Film*

TREVOR STARK

Approach the groups, listen. A whole population is discussing serious mat-
ters, and for the first time workers can be heard exchanging their views
on problems which until now have been broached only by philosophers.

-—August Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,
Paris, May 19, 18711

I have come to Besançon to speak about the necessity of reconstructing a
common culture that permits all of us, anew, to speak to one another and
to understand one another . . . that gives the strength to defeat one’s fear
and to become an actor in one’s own life. . . . For me, culture is not solely
reserved for the privileged few, it is not for a small elite. . . . I believe in the
creative force of capitalism, but I am convinced that capitalism cannot sur-
vive without an ethics, without respect for a certain number of spiritual
valeurs, moral values, without humanism, without culture. We have to put
culture back into capitalism. We have to balance capitalism with culture.
We have to put capitalism back in the service of a certain ideal of man.

—Nicolas Sarkozy, Besançon,
Mars 13, 20072

On May 3, 2007, near the end of his president ial campaign, Nicolas
Sarkozy promised the French public that, if elected, he would “liquidate the her-

This paper developed out of a seminar on postwar European art, directed by Benjamin Buchloh
*
at Harvard University in 2010. I owe my foremost thanks to Buchloh, who supported this project from
its inception, and to Malcolm Turvey, for his invaluable editorial critique. Thanks are also due to Maria
Gough, my colleagues in the seminar, ISKRA, the Harvard Film Archives, et, for their generous
advice on early drafts, Samuel Johnson, Kevin Lotery, and Annie Rudd.
1.
August Villier s de l’Isle-Adam, “ Tableau de Par is,” Le Tribun du Peuple (19 May 1871).
Reproduced in La Commune de Paris Aujourd’hui, éd. Jacques Zwirn (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier,
1999), p. 139. All translations are my own, unless otherwise specified.
2.
Discours2007transcript.php?n=Sarkozy&p=2007-03-13 (accessed September 1, 2011).

Nicolas Sarkozy, “Discours à Besançon, 13 Mars, 2007,” n.p., sites.univ-provence.fr/veronis/

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

118

OCTOBER

Georges Binetruy and the
Medvedkin Group. © ISKRA.

itage of May 1968.”3 Yet the stakes of this now-infamous piece of political theater
and the connotations of “May” within its rhetoric were most clearly established
in another campaign speech delivered in Besançon on March 13, 2007, cited
au-dessus de. In Besançon, Sarkozy contended that to oppose the “heritage of May ’68”
was to take a stand “against the refusal of all authority, against cultural and
moral relativism, against lowering standards [nivellement par le bas] . . . against the
lack of culture.”4 Sarkozy’s decision to deliver his most scathing denunciation of
the cultural and political legacy of the French 1960s in Besançon was itself a
symbolic gesture of no small strategic significance. For Besançon emblematizes
both the immediate prehistory of the upheavals of May ’68—in the strikes and
factory occupations that began there in March 1967—and their most potent
afterlife—in the experiments in autogestion, or workers’ self-management, que
culminated in the cooperative established in the occupied LIP watch factory in
1973. In his association of the struggles for self-determination that took hold in
Besançon during the late 1960s with the wholesale denigration of culture, et
in his call for culture as a force of reconciliation in service of capital, Sarkozy
reveals the contours of what might be called his politics of aesthetics.

It is in Besançon, donc, that one might begin to establish a counterhistory
of the moment that Sarkozy, in high Stalinist language, would “liquidate.” The
Besançon Groupe Medvedkine, one of postwar Europe’s most significant experiments
in cultural production “from below,” stands as an exemplary anamnestic to Sarkozy’s
claim that a generalized opposition to culture is foremost among the inheritances of
May. Entre 1967 et 1971, a group of workers at the Rhodiaceta textile factory in
Besançon, with no prior training or experience in cinema, produced a number of
extraordinarily variegated films reflecting what Kristin Ross has called “the union of

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Quoted in Louis-Jean Calvet and Jean Véronis, Les Mots de Nicolas Sarkozy (Paris: Éditions Seuil,

3.
2008), p. 152.
4.

Sarkozy, “Discours à Besançon, 13 Mars, 2007,” n.p.

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

119

intellectual contestation with workers’ struggles” that culminated in 1968.5 The col-
lective emerged from a sustained rencontre with the French filmmaker Chris Marker
and the film-production cooperative SLON (Service de lancement des oeuvres nouvelles),
which dedicated itself during these years to fostering a cinéma ouvrier, adamantly
refusing any leadership role and with it the model of individual authorship altogeth-
er.6 As Marker put it in an interview from 2003, his project was “to give the power of
speech to people who don’t have it, et, when it’s possible, to help them find their
own means of expression.”7

In the face of the call to “put culture back into capitalism” as the foundation
of a new “common culture,” it becomes urgent to recover a conception of cultural
democratization that entailed not universal access to art as a palliative, but con-
frontation with the political fault lines running through the field of representation.
Cependant, if today the Medvedkin Group is charged with the potential energy of
anachronism, so too was it at the moment of its inception. The group’s collective
moniker itself evinces Marker’s untimely resuscitation of the legacy of Soviet factog-
raphie, as received through its least likely practitioner, the satirical filmmaker
Alexander Medvedkin. Tracing the historical conjunctions and disjunctions that led
to the genesis of the group, this essay will focus on the first two films produced
through the common labor of those previously kept separate: À bientôt j’espère
(1967–68), a documentary on the struggles at Rhodiaceta by Chris Marker, Mario
Marret, and SLON; and Classe de lutte (1968), the Medvedkin Group’s first collective
film. As a means of coming to terms with the specificity of the Medvedkin Group’s
cinematic practice, this essay will end with a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard’s con-
temporaneous work in the Groupe Dziga Vertov, with its parallel but ultimately
irreconcilable claims for self-reflexivity, collectivity, and class consciousness.

On February 25, 1967, three thousand workers in Besançon occupied the
Rhodiaceta textile factory owned by Rhône-Poulenc, then one of the largest French
corporations, and declared a strike that lasted over a month.8 This was the first facto-
ry occupation in France since 1936, a date that reverberated within the factory walls

“Les Révoltés de la Rhodia”

Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 11.
5.
6.
Kristin Ross has argued that the model of the “rencontre,” to which I will return in closing,
exemplifies the challenges to specialization that flourished in May 1968. See ibid., p. 103. Dans 1974,
SLON changed its name to ISKRA (Image, Son, Kinescope et Réalisations Audiovisuelles, referencing
Lenin’s newspaper Iskra [“spark” in Russian]) and moved its base from Brussels to Paris. Still opera-
tive today, the group is dedicated to producing films “that quxestion our world by giving speech to
those who do not have it.” For more on SLON and ISKRA see the booklet published with the
Medvedkin Group DVD collection, Les Groupes Medvedkine: Le cinéma est une arme (Paris: Éditions
Montparnasse, 2006), pp. 6–9.
Chris Marker, “Marker Direct,” Film Comment 39, Non. 3 (May–June 2003), p. 39.
7.
8.
Georges Maurivard, a worker at Rhodiaceta in the 1960s and a member of the Medvedkin
Groupe, has recently offered an account of the strike in Georges Maurivard, “‘Classes de Lutte,’ luttes
de classes,” Critique Communiste 186 (Mars 2008), pp. 92–100.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

120

OCTOBER

for the duration of the strike, lending the demonstrations an incipient sense of his-
toricity as they quickly spread through the Rhône-Poulenc trust. The events at
Rhodiaceta were initiated by those who worked the “4/8,” a debilitating seven-day
schedule shared by four teams who worked staggered eight-hour morning, afternoon,
and night shifts—two morning shifts followed by two afternoons, then three night
shifts, and finally two days of rest before the cycle began again. The terms of the
strike, cependant, were not restricted to grievances related to hours, pay, and working
conditions. What was unique at Rhodiaceta was that one of the most prevalent
demands of the striking workers was access to culture, not as a utopian slogan but as
a pragmatic political claim—one to which, cependant, no factory directorate could ade-
quately respond. In speeches, interviews, tracts, and posters, the workers in Besançon
contended that culture was a mechanism for the maintenance of class hierarchies;
and by extension, in recognizing themselves as the constitutive exclusion of the cul-
tural sphere, the strikers called into question the conception of culture as a separate
category within bourgeois society, supposedly divorced from the means-end rationali-
ty of productive existence.

The centrality of culture to the workers’ struggle in Besançon can primarily
be credited to the local cultural center known as the CCPPO (Centre culturel popu-
laire de Palente-les-Orchamps). From its foundation on September 9, 1959, the cen-
ter’s first president, Pol Cèbe (a worker at the Rhodiaceta factory and resident of
the working-class district of Palente-les-Orchamps), along with two Besançon
teachers, René and Micheline Berchoud, established an ambitious cultural pro-
gram for the local community, including performances of Brecht plays, lectures
on Picasso, and an evening consecrated to Jacques Prévert and his work with the
Groupe Octobre during the years of the Popular Front.9 They also held regular
projections of films such as René Vautier’s banned Afrique 50, The Grapes of Wrath,
Godard’s La Chinoise, and works by Eisenstein and Joris Ivens. Concurrently, Cèbe
took over the factory library at Rhodiaceta, which had fallen into disuse, and filled
the shelves with classics of Marxist and Communist thought as well as with poetry
and art monographs, transforming the small library into a space for workers to
assemble, hold reading groups, debate, and organize. In their manifold activities,
the CCPPO self-consciously adopted Brecht’s principle that

one need not be afraid to produce daring, unusual things for the prole-
tariat so long as they deal with its real situation. There will always be peo-
ple of culture, connoisseurs of art, who will interject: “Ordinary people do
not understand that.” But the people will push these persons impatiently
aside and come to a direct understanding with artists.10

For an account of the CCPPO, see ISKRA, pp. 2–5, and Cèbe’s brief recollections in Maurivard,
9.
p. 100. Bruno Muel offers a remarkable testimony of Cèbe’s role in the CCPPO and the Medvedkin
Groups in Bruno Muel, “Les riches heures du groupe Medvedkine (Besançon-Sochaux, 1967–1974),»
Images Documentaires 37/38 (2000), pp. 15–35.
10.
p. 84.

Bertolt Brecht, “Popularity and Realism,” in Aesthetics and Politics (Londres: Verso Press, 2007),

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

121

It was into this well-formed atmosphere of cultural contestation that Chris
Marker entered on March 8, 1967, when he received a letter from Besançon.
Written by René Berchoud, the letter informed Marker of the recent events at
Rhodiaceta and asked if he would be willing to send any films for projection in the
occupied factory—and why not come down and see what was going on himself ? À
Marker, who had spent the better part of his career since the 1950s making film-
essays in locales such as China, Cuba, Israel, and Siberia, Berchoud made a plea
for local matters: “If you aren’t in China or elsewhere, come to Rhodia—impor-
tant things are happening.”11

This letter, in fact, was the culmination of a prolonged correspondence
between Marker and the Berchouds that was predicated on their parallel experi-
ences in French post-Liberation popular-culture movements. In the 1940s, Marker
worked for the sister organizations Peuple et Culture and Travail et Culture, lequel
sought to “bring culture to the people and the people to culture” as a means of
fostering radically democratic forms of popular expression.12 Initially a member
of the theater workshop, Marker soon worked alongside André Bazin in the film
section of Travail et Culture, organized Peuple et Culture’s educational dossier,
DOC, and edited, with Benigno Cacérès, a volume of documents on the history of
French working-class movements since the nineteenth century entitled Regards sur
le Mouvement ouvrier.13 Marker opened this latter text with Brecht’s poem
“Questions from a Worker Who Reads,” thus evincing the commitments he shared
with the activists at the CCPPO.14 It was, in fact, the Peuple et Culture movement
that provided the impetus for the foundation of the CCPPO and for its dedication
to a Brechtian paradigm of the popular.15 However, this historical conjunction
linking the filmmaker to the center, and thus providing the conditions of possibili-
ty for the Medvedkin Group’s eventual formation, remained latent until Berchoud
sent his invitation during the strikes of March 1967.

Marker recalls that when he received the message from Besançon he was in
the process of editing the first SLON project, Loin du Vietnam (1967), a collective
cinematic protest against the Vietnam War with contributions from Godard, Ivens,
William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda.16 Abandoning his
editing table, Marker drove 400 km from Paris to Besançon with his soundman
Antoine Bonfanti, his cameraman Pierre Lhomme, and photographer Michèle
Bouder, and met Cèbe, the Berchouds, and a number of striking workers. Soon

11.
Berchoud, quoted in ISKRA, p. 5. Until his involvement at Rhodiaceta, Marker’s only major
films shot in France were Le Joli Mai (1963) and La Jetée (1962). The former will be discussed briefly
below.
12.
For a brief but insightful account of Marker’s involvement with these organizations, voir
Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),
pp. 23–27.
Ibid..
13.
14.
Bénigno Cacérès and Christian Marker, Regards sur le Mouvement Ouvrier (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1951), p. 7.
Ibid., p. 3.
15.
ISKRA, p. 14.
16.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

122

OCTOBER

after, Marker published a report on the strike complete with photographs and
interviews in the March 22 issue of Le Nouvel Observateur. “The question for these
men,” Marker writes, “is not to negotiate—in the American style—their integra-
tion into a ‘society of well-being,’ but to contest this society itself and the value of
the ‘compensations’ it offers.”17 Marker situates Rhodiaceta at the disavowed cen-
ter of postwar French prosperity, giving the lie to the propagandistic media tropes
of the “end of the class struggle.” One worker interviewed by Marker argues, “This
movement calls into question the entire society in which we live.” Another states,
“They want us to always be proles [prolos], uncultivated men who are there for
work and that’s it. How do you think a guy who has just worked eight hours at
Rhodia can look to develop himself intellectually? It’s almost impossible.” He con-
tinues, “We can’t fight exclusively on the union level or the political level, if we
don’t fight at the same time on the cultural level, on the level of the development
of one’s personality, of one’s intelligence, etc.”18 At Rhodiaceta, culture signified
the capability to express oneself and not be reduced to silence. Not restricted to
seeking specific remunerations, the strike contested the very foundation of a
political order based upon the division of manual and intellectual labor.

Be Seeing You

Inspired by this experience, over the course of the year, Marker and his crew
frequently shuttled between Paris and Besançon, establishing ties with the CCPPO,
secretly shooting footage in the factory, interviewing workers, and attempting to
involve them directly in the production of a film about the factory occupation and its
consequences. The initial result of these trips to Besançon is À bientôt j’espère, filmed
by Marker between March 1967 and January 1968 with the Communist filmmaker
Mario Marret and the SLON team.19 The film opens on Christmas Eve, 1967, mois
after the end of the strike, with a shot of workers exiting the Rhodiaceta factory—
thereby echoing the image of labor (ou, more precisely, its cessation) that inaugu-
rates the cinema itself in La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (1895) by those fellow
natives of Besançon the Lumière brothers.20 As the workers exit the factory, Georges
(Yoyo) Maurivard, a young militant, attempts to gather together a group to demon-
strate in support of recently laid-off comrades from a Rhône-Poulenc factory in Lyon.
Marker’s film follows Maurivard from his initial prise de parole in March to his increas-
ing involvement as a delegate of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor
(Confédération française démocratique du travail, CFDT) et, by the end of 1967, of the

17. Marker, “Les Révoltés de la Rhodia,” Le Nouvel Observateur 123 (March 22–29, 1967), p. 26.
Ibid., pp. 27–28.
18.
19.
The role played by Marret in the film’s production is ambiguous. Marker later writes, “It was to
him that we owe, throughout À bientôt j’espère, this ambiance of perfect equality between filmmakers and
filmed that I surely could not have accomplished alone.” Marker, “Pour Mario,” in ISKRA, pp. 11–19.
20. Making this connection explicit, Marker wrote a script in the early 1970s for an unrealized film
entitled La Sortie des usines Peugeot that he proposed to Bruno Muel. Muel, “Les riches heures du
groupe Medvedkine,” pp. 31–32.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

123

General Confederation of Labor (Confédération
générale du travail, CGT), France’s largest trade
union, officially affiliated in the 1960s with the
French Communist Party (PCF).21 Interviewed by
the filmmakers in December with a group of fellow
Rhodiaceta workers, Maurivard describes his falter-
ing and fearful first attempt to stand on an over-
turned barrel and address his comrades to urge the
continuation of the strike. The interview flashes
back to a shot of Maurivard in March, reading a
tract into a microphone before three thousand
striking workers and a mass of supporters. Over a
montage pairing footage shot amid and above the
crowd with still photographs of workers and graffiti
on the factory walls, Marker argues in a voice-over
that the originality of the strike could be found in
“the idea, continually reprised, that inequality on
the level of working condit ions translated to
inequality in all levels of life, that no salary hikes
would suffice to compensate.”22 He continues, “The
tangible result of the strike is not the percentage of
pay augmentation achieved but the education of a
generation of young workers who have discovered
in the identity of their conditions, the identity of
their struggle.” Corroborating Marker’s claims,
Maurivard states that during the strike, the workers
“lived for the first time an experience of collectivi-
ty” and that, in the occupied factory, they “mutually
discovered one another.” As attested by the men

George Ross provides a historical context for a shift in
21.
allegiance such as Maurivard’s, explaining, “The Rhodiaceta
strike was interesting because of conflicts between the CFDT and
the CGT regarding its conduct. The CFDT in Besançon original-
ly sparked the strike over working conditions (having to do with
the work schedules of swing shift workers). When the strike
spread through the Rhône-Poulenc complex the CGT took over
its guidance, leading to a wages/hours national settlement,
according to its own tactical goals. The Besançon/Rhodiaceta
CFDT was unhappy at this settlement and continued to agitate
around the issues of working conditions, an agitation which bore
fruit in May 1968.” George Ross, Workers and Communists in France:
From Popular Front to Eurocommunism (Berkeley: University of
Presse californienne, 1982), p. 162.
22.
my own.

All translations of French dialogue from the films are

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Chris Marker and
Mario Marret.
À bientôt j’espère.
1967–68. © ISKRA.

124

OCTOBER

interviewed in the film, what was most shocking was the experience of entering the
factory and feeling calm, of setting up a cinema in the factory, of dancing, of appro-
priating the space of dehumanization as a space for community.

Opposed to a model where “socialism means working hard,” the commu-
nity formed in March did not elevate work into a shared essence.23 Rather, the tes-
timonials recorded in À bientôt j’espère emphasize the liberating experience of lay-
ing claim to sectors of life inaccessible to the worker-as-such: to creativity, to cul-
ture, to communication. In one sequence, Marker shoots a poster made during
the occupations that reads, “The CCPPO demands BREAD for all, mais aussi: peace,
laughter, theater, life.” Facing the camera in
close-up, Cèbe emphasizes these concerns: “For
us culture is a struggle, a claim. Just as with the
right to have bread and lodgings, we claim the
right to culture—it’s the same fight for culture
as for the union or in the political field.” By
refusing the stultifying identity of the worker
denied all opportunity for “self-cultivation” and
by establishing lines of communication between
striking workers, artistes, and militant student
“comités de soutien,” a community emerged that
destabilized monolithic and integral categories
of identity, and thereby exceeded the bounds of
traditional union or party representation (un
conflict that only intensified, as we shall see). Dans
this way, the communitarian experiment of March approached the condition of
an “unworked” or inoperative community (communauté désoeuvrée) in Jean-Luc
Nancy’s sense, one profoundly inimical to the discourse of community as a work
(c'est à dire., a unified “project of fusion”) or as being constituted through work (as in the
ideal Platonic Republic where each person is defined by his or her role within the
division of labor).24 Marker later claimed, “You don’t need a degree in sociology to
find in this state of things, one year in advance, the essential themes of May ’68.”25
À bientôt j’espère contrasts the efflorescence of protest and communication in
March with its suppression in the following months. In a typically dialectical juxtapo-
sition of voiceover and image, Marker pairs a montage of machinery producing syn-

Marker and Marret.
À bientôt j’espère.
1967–68. © ISKRA.

23.
Guy Debord quotes this statement by German Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert and notes that it
is “a fine herald of that image of socialism which was soon to emerge as the mortal enemy of the prole-
tariat.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone
Livres, 1994), p. 67.
24.
Community, for Nancy, is not produced as an oeuvre, which would “presuppose that the common
être, as such, be objectifiable and producible (in sites, persons, buildings, discours, institutions,
symbols: in short, in subjects).” Rather, community takes place in the interruption or fragmentation of
forms of integral and closed being-without-relation. Community, donc, “is the unworking of work
that is social, économique, technique, and institutional.” Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, éd.
and trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 15, 31.
25.

ISKRA, p. 15.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

125

thetic fibers shot secretly in Rhodiaceta by Bruno
Muel26 with the test imony of a worker who
describes the way in which the mechanical time of
the factory has completely quantified even the
most personal, internal, physiological aspects of his
vie: “To eat, in principle, one must be hungry.
Cependant, when we eat, it’s not because we’re hun-
gry, it’s because the electronic brain thought that
we should eat because of a gap in production.”
Another worker descr ibes the reified and
exchangeable time of the factory as an inescapable
repetition, a perpetual return of the same: “It’s like
always seeing the same film, always listening to the
same record.” In their emphasis on the petrifica-
tion of variable human time into static mechanical
t ime, these sequences reflect Georg Lukács’
description of the fragmentation of experience
under industr ial condit ions of labor, lequel
“reduces space and time to a common denomina-
tor and degrades t ime to the dimension of
space.”27 In order to express this degradation cine-
matically, Marker interviews a worker who per-
forms the same gesture at a machine two hundred
and forty-four times throughout the course of an
eight-hour day, the temporal flux of his lived dura-
tion measured precisely by the number of times he
carries out a predetermined set of motions. He sits
in his kitchen and re-performs the rationalized
movements of his daily labor for the camera, his
bandaged hands moving as determined by the
absent machine, in one of the many close-ups of
hands in Marker’s films. Between these hands and
those of Maurivard, pointing and gesturing while
speaking to a crowd, the filmmakers trace the
transformations and disappointments of the March
mouvement. As the film ends, Maurivard proclaims

Marker and Marret.
À bientôt j’espère.
1967–68. © ISKRA.

26. Muel recalls that in January 1968, while Marker and Marret were busy editing, they asked him to
film inside Rhodiaceta, against the decree of the factory director. Maurivard snuck Muel and René
Vautier into the factory, where they shot all À bientôt j’espère’s footage of the factory interior. Muel, “Les
riches heures du groupe Medvedkine,” pp. 18–19.
27.
In Bergsonian language, Lukács argues that under capitalism, “time sheds its qualitative, variable,
flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’
(the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human
personality): in short, it becomes space.” Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: AVEC Presse, 1971), p. 90.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

126

OCTOBER

with conviction that even after the strike’s defeat, the experience of community that
it fostered has persisted and will form the foundation of a successful working-class
mouvement. En effet, for Maurivard, this community was in itself a form of culture.

Maurivard’s words delineate the central paradox faced by Marker in his first
months at Rhodiaceta: How to translate the workers’ struggle into cinema such
that the filmmaker would not simply reinscribe the relations of domination
between those who have access to culture and those who do not, between those
who have the power to represent and those who are simply represented? These
tensions reached a point of crisis on April 27, 1968, when Marker held the film’s
première at the CCPPO for the Rhodiaceta workers and the local community.
While it had its defenders, Cèbe foremost among them, the film was met with a
largely hostile reception, even among those who had actively participated in its
production. The union leaders either refused to attend the screening or vehe-
mently aired their protests. In response, Marker held a discussion after the projec-
tion, recorded by the soundman Bonfanti.28 One worker states, “I think that the
director is incompetent. . . . And I also think, and I say it bluntly, that the workers
of Rhodia have simply been exploited.” Another criticizes Marker for the fact that
women in the film appear exclusively as wives rather than as workers and militants
in their own right. In one of the most incisive comments, Georges Lièvremont, un
worker interviewed in À bientôt j’espère, proclaims, “I believe that, frankly, Chris is a
romantic. He has seen the workers and the union romantically.” For Lièvremont,
if Marker contrasted the debilitating working conditions at Rhodiaceta with the
liberating experience of the strike, he conjured away the pragmatic and unro-
mantic daily labor of organization.

Marker’s response to the group, also captured on tape, is worth citing at

length:

We have also carried out a parallel activity, putting cameras and tape
recorders into the hands of young militants, led by a hypothesis that is
still evident to me: that we will always be at best well-intentioned explor-
ers, more or less friendly, but from the outside; et ça, as with its libera-
tion, the cinematic representation and expression of the working class
will be its own work. With audiovisual equipment in hand, workers them-
selves will show us films about the working class, about what it is to go on
strike, about the inside of a factory. We could be ten thousand times more
crafty, and less romantic, and still be limited by the cinematographic reali-
ty that one experiences all the time, whether among penguins or work-
ers, que, bien sûr, one can only ever really express what one lives.29

The recording is included in ISKRA’s Groupes Medvedkine DVD collection, and partly transcribed

28.
in ISKRA, pp. 20–21.
29.
This seemingly enigmatic statement refers to Les Pingouins, a film that Mario Marret made in
Antarctica, which won the Cannes prize for best nature documentary in 1954. Noted in Muel, “Les
riches heures du groupe Medvedkine,” p. 19, and Lupton, Chris Marker, p. 229.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

127

The experience of the film’s rejec-
tion by the very people for whom it was
intended instigated the second phase of
Marker’s involvement in Besançon.
En effet, Marker titles the sound record-
ing La Charnière, or “the hinge point.”
While filming À bientôt j’espère, Marker
and SLON, with the encouragement of
Cèbe, began teaching basic film tech-
nique to any interested worker s.
Following the perceived failure of À bien-
tôt j’espère, this “parallel activity” was for-
malized as the Besançon Medvedkin
Groupe. Based out of the CCPPO, which was transformed into a film workshop
complete with an Atlas editing table brought in from Paris, SLON provided
handheld 16mm cameras and tape recorders, and began to make films in col-
laboration with the workers. Set against the individualism and unilateralism of
culture in bourgeois society, this militant cinema would follow a collective and
nonhierarchical model of product ion, seeking to abolish the separat ion
between expert and amateur, between producer and consumer, a gambit that
would last almost five years in Besançon before spreading to a Peugeot factory
in Sochaux-Montbéliard.

CCPPO Film Workshop (left to right):
Jacques Loiseleux, Henri Traforetti, Georges
Binetruy, and Bruno Muel. © ISKRA.

Train of Revolution, Train of History

In forming a collective, the workers at Rhodiaceta adopted the name of the
Russian filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, who by the 1960s was almost totally
unknown outside of the Soviet Union. In order to account for this gesture of soli-
darity across national, politique, and generational divides, it is necessary to outline
Medvedkin’s project in the early 1930s and the impact that it had on Marker’s
thinking at the time of his engagement in Besançon. It was, in fact, Marker’s
oblique and partial confrontation with the legacy of Soviet factography, as filtered
through Medvedkin’s project, that provided the impetus for the filmmaker to
place the camera in the hands of those he had sought to represent.

Dans 1961, at a film festival in Brussels, Marker saw Medvedkin’s Happiness
(Schastye; 1935), and described it as “a superb film as beautiful as Eisenstein’s, comme
popular as Mussorgsky’s music, deeply moving. . . . Where was the author? Dead?
Alive?”30 Struck by this comedy on the difficult adjustment of an incompetent
yet sympathetic peasant to his new life as a collective farmer, a film whose very
emphasis on satire seemed to exceed the bounds of Socialist Realism, Marker

30.
Anne Philipe, “Medvedkine, tu connais? Interview avec Slon et Chris Maker,” Le Monde
(Décembre 2, 1971), p. 17. Translated in Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker (Chicago: University of Illinois
Presse, 2006), pp. 139–44.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

128

OCTOBER

searched mostly in vain for any information on Medvedkin. In his research, il
eventually came across Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1960) by Jay
Leyda, an American filmmaker and historian who had studied with Eisenstein in
the 1930s.31 Leyda’s book, in under two pages, provided one of the only English-
language accounts of Medvedkin’s kino-poezd, or ciné-train, which consisted of
three train carriages transformed into a film-production studio complete with
projection room and living quarters.32 Leyda concisely describes the “several
sided task” of Medvedkin’s “self-contained film studio” as they traveled the
Soviet Union in 1932 under the orders of the Central Committee with the aim
of making agitational films for and with local populations:

In addition to making instructional
films to help local problems, pour
example, overcoming winter condi-
tions to speed up freight shipments,
the film crew was able to produce crit-
ical films on local conditions (bureau-
cracy, inefficiency, nepot ism, etc.)
that they or the local political workers
judged to require t heir ungent le
attention. The prime audience for
ces, as for the instructional films,
was the local one, who would greet
these barbed film vaudevilles with wel-
come laughs and blushes.33

Alexander Medvedkin and
the ciné-train team. 1932.
© Les Films de l’Astrophore.

Dans 1971, Marker writes that these pages were a dream “for a pseudo-director
lost in the jungle where worldly professionalism and corporatism join in prevent-
ing the cinema from falling into the hands of the people.”34 For many years,
Marker had to be content with these few, mysterious, and tantalizing scraps of
information. In November 1967, cependant, while still working on À bientôt j’espère,
Marker attended the International Festival of Documentary Film in Leipzig and
was introduced by Leyda to Medvedkin. This meeting sparked a close friendship
that would last until Medvedkin’s death in 1989, at the age of 89. Through hours
of conversation and copious correspondence, culminating in a visit to Paris in

The extraordinary scope of Leyda’s career is outlined in Annette Michelson, “Jay Leyda:

31.
1910–1988,” Cinema Journal 28, Non. 1 (Autumn 1988), pp. 12–16.
32.
According to Emma Widdis, the only monograph on Medvedkin until her own book from 2005
was in Russian and written during the Soviet period. Emma Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin (Londres: I.B.
Tauris, 2005), p. 2.
33.
1983), pp. 286–87.
34. Marker, “Le ciné-ours,” Image et Son 255 (Décembre 1971), p. 4.

Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

129

1971, Medvedkin recounted the experience of the ciné-train to Marker, Cèbe,
et, by proxy, to the workers in Besançon.35

Like Dziga Vertov, Medvedkin began his career on the Bolshevik agit-trains
of the civil-war years (c. 1917–1922), which traveled the breadth of the future
Soviet Union, visiting Red Army outposts, distributing propagandistic pamphlets,
staging small exhibitions, and screening films.36 As Richard Taylor notes, the film
sections of the agit-trains had a twofold task: “first, to demonstrate in the
provinces agit-films produced in the centre and, second, to supply newsreel and
documentary material from the provinces to the centre.”37 Years later, amid the
sociale, politique, and productive transformations inaugurated by the rapid indus-
trialization and collectivization of agriculture during Stalin’s First Five Year Plan
(1928–1932), Medvedkin became convinced of the necessity of reviving and
reconceiving the agit-train as a means of revolutionizing the consciousness of a
largely illiterate peasantry.38 Medvedkin’s train distinguished itself through its
exclusive focus on film, lequel, because of its dynamism, its popular appeal, its
potential for mass reproduction and distribution, and its silence (soliciting real-
time interaction and discussion), was deemed ideally suited for the construction
of the new Soviet collective subject.39

During its first year in 1932, Medvedkin’s ciné-train traveled to mines, facto-
ries, and collective farms across the USSR and produced 72 films.40 Filming at an
incredible pace, Medvedkin saw his team as “cinematic Stakhanovites”—the Soviet
term used for workers who over-fulfilled production targets—following the motto
“film today and show it tomorrow.”41 Medvedkin’s practice was committed not only

35.
Dans 1971, while in Paris to make a film about the superiority of Soviet environmental policy,
Medvedkin met with Marker, Cèbe, and other members of the Medvedkin Group. Marker interviewed
Medvedkin at the Noisy-le-Sec train depot, and included this footage in Le Train en marche (1971), un
film made to introduce SLON’s French release of Happiness. Cèbe offers a short but remarkable
account of his encounter with Medvedkin in Pol Cèbe, “Rencontre avec Medvedkine,” L’Avant-Scène
Cinéma 120 (Décembre 1971), pp. 8–9. Selections of Marker and Medvedkin’s letters were recently
published for the first time in Russian in the journal Kinovedcheskie zapiski 49 (2000).
36.
For an account of the genesis of the Soviet agit-trains, see Richard Taylor, “A Medium for the
Masses: Agitation in the Soviet Civil War,” Soviet Studies 22, Non. 4 (Avril 1971), pp. 562 –74. For purely
pragmatic reasons, Vertov will unfortunately make only brief and refractive appearances in this paper.
It will suffice here to note that Vertov was responsible for editing footage shot on the agit-trains, lequel
he incorporated into his weekly newsreels, Kino-Nedelya, and later into his full-length films Anniversary of
the Revolution (1919) and History of the Civil War (1921). Ibid., p. 568.
37.
Ibid..
For an important account of the significance of “cultural revolution” during the First Five Year
38.
Plan, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in Cultural Revolution in Russia,
1928–1931, éd. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington: Presse universitaire de l'Indiana, 1978), pp. 8–41.
39. Medvedkin’s initial proposal to the Central Film Committee was vetoed, partially because of the
administration’s resistance to critical satire, leading him to directly petition the Party Central Committee,
which agreed to fund the train and provide their assignments. See Stephen Crofts and Masha
Enzensberger, “Medvedkin: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” Screen 19, Non. 1 (1978), p. 73.
40. Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin, p. 24.
41.

Ibid..

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

130

OCTOBER

to high production rates but also, unlike the cen-
tralized model of the civil-war agit-trains, to an
ethos of geographical contingency: the subjects
of the ciné-train’s films were also their intended
audience. His films attempted to record the con-
dit ions of product ion at a given site and to
encourage hard work as much as to “shame”
unproductive or wasteful labor. Presenting work-
ers at a collective farm with both their shortcom-
ing s and posit ive counterexamples (souvent
through segments filmed in neighboring collec-
tive farms), the reels singled out individual work-
er s, often by name, wit h a stock intert it le
declaiming, “Comrades, this cannot go on!” The
emphasis on the veridical potential of the cam-
era coexisted uneasily with satirical sequences
acted out by the train’s crew (illustrating produc-
tive or ideological deficiencies) and even with
pr imit ive forms of animat ion (a “camel of
shame” exposes lazy workers to ridicule). Pour
Medvedkin, this fragile tension between realism
and vaudeville, between documentation and agi-
tation, would be sublated in the overriding ori-
entation of the films toward effecting maximal
and verifiable changes in the social contexts
filmed. Medvedkin claimed with pride that as a
result of his screenings, “five collective farms ful-
filled the Plan’s targets for grain yield.” With an
evident sense of vindication, Medvedkin wrote in
his diary that thanks to the ciné-train’s work on
one collective farm, ten kulaks, or wealthy peas-
ants regarded as class enemies, had their proper-
t y seized and were forcibly deported. 42 Comme
Medvedkin later put it, this was cinema “acting as
public prosecutor.”43

Medvedkin’s work during the ciné-train
years is intimately bound up with the Soviet dis-
courses of factography and operativism, lequel
developed in tandem with the First Five Year Plan

Medvedkin ciné-train. How Do
You Live, Comrade Miner?
© Les Films de l’Astrophore.

Ibid., p. 28. For a discussion of the role of artists in “dekulakization,” see Maria Gough, “Radical

42.
Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (Fall 2006), p. 162.
43. Medvedkin, quoted in Crofts and Enzensberger, “Medvedkin,” p. 73.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

131

and were given their strongest articulation by the writer and photographer Sergei
Tret’iakov. The distance between the two figures is considerable: there is no docu-
mentation of any personal relationship between Tret’iakov and Medvedkin, et
sat ire was as unthinkable to the former as it was obligator y to the latter.
Nevertheless, they were engaged in parallel projects, both traveling to collective
farms in the same years, driven by a need, acutely felt by a generation of Russian
artistes, to abandon representation for praxis and to make themselves useful in the
process of Soviet construction. For Tret’iakov, factography was a practice that
sought—whether in written or photographic form—the direct “inscription of facts,»
pas, as with documentary, in order to capture an accurate image of the world, but as
part of a commitment to transform it.44 This latter aspect was described by
Tret’iakov as the factographic principle of “operativism,” defined as the abandon-
ment of detached observation for an active participation in “the life of the materi-
al.”45 In Devin Fore’s words, “‘Operativity’ was the term Tret’iakov used to designate
a situational aesthetics that conceptualized representation not as an objective reflec-
tion of a static world, but as an operation that by definition intervenes in the con-
text of the aesthetic act.”46 Like Tret’iakov, Medvedkin indissolubly linked “the
demonstration of the fact” with “the activation of the spectator.”47 Indeed, both ulti-
mately sought to hold up a transformative and coercive mirror to the people, à
show them the facts of their daily existence, lequel, once reflected back to them,
would provoke them to take their lives into their own hands and change. In this way,
Medvedkin and Tret’iakov turned to the speed, reproducibility, and democratic
accessibility of photography and film as means of realizing the avant-garde dream of
a shift from spectatorial contemplation to political activation.

The factographic project was significantly driven by a commitment to
deprofessionalization. Par exemple, Medvedkin was the only member of his thir-
ty-two-person team to possess any cinematographic experience, and Tret’iakov
argued that an accumulation of photographs by any “shutter-clicking kid” (foto-
malchik) would be preferable to the unique productions of professional artists.48
Not simply a matter of increasing the rate of mimetic production, the “opera-
tivist” emphasis on deskilling and de-specialization stemmed from the convic-
tion that representation was not “a unique individual skill” but rather “the prop-

44. My discussion here is indebted to the pathbreaking work of Maria Gough and Devin Fore on
Tret’iakov and factography. See Gough, “Radical Tourism,” and Devin Fore, “Introduction,” October 118
(Fall 2006), pp. 3-dix. The words “inscription of facts” are Fore’s and aptly echo Soviet critic Osip
Br ik’s phrase “the fixat ion and mont age of fact .” See Leah Dickerman, “ The Fact and the
Photograph,” October 118 (Fall 2006), p. 134, and Natasha Kurchanova, “Osip Brik and the Politics of
the Avant-Garde,” October 134 (Fall 2010), p. 64.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” October 118 (Fall 2006), p. 69.
45.
Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October 118 (Fall 2006), p. 105.
46.
47.
In Tret’iakov’s words, “capturing the fact is a task of utmost importance in the country that has
presented its citizens with the long, difficult and joyous task of completely restructuring everyday life.”
Tret’iakov, “Our Cinema,” October 118 (Fall 2006), p. 35.
48. Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin, p. 23. Tret’iakov, quoted in Gough, “Radical Tourism,” p. 168.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

132

OCTOBER

erty of public education.”49 As cultural
production dissolved itself as a special-
ized métier and assumed a utilitarian
role in shaping consciousness, it would
become, in Tret’iakov’s words, “an actu-
al weapon in the revolutionary, opera-
t ive act ivit y of the huge masses who
have been summoned to socialist con-
st ruct ion.” 50 De même, Medvedkin
argued, “Cinema can be not only a
weapon ‘in general’ but a ver y real
weapon in the Party cells, in concrete
areas of socialist construction.”51

Medvedkin and Cèbe,
1971. © ISKRA.

“The ciné-train is somewhat of a myth for us—train of revolution, train of
histoire,” Marker states in Le Train en marche, a short film made during Medvedkin’s
1971 visit to Paris, “but the biggest mistake would be to believe that it had come to
a halt.”52 That same year, in an interview about the significance of Medvedkin’s
project for his own, Marker claimed,

The train was not bringing art to the people; its function was to incite the
people to intervene in matters with which they were concerned. . . . Le
experience remains unique. The Medvedkin team is alone to have
achieved this type of instantaneous invention of a film, with people associ-
ated with its creation and interested in its immediate utilization because it
was dealing with problems that had to be solved immediately.53

Medvedkin, for his part, was happy to emphasize the aspects of his project
that were most enthusiastically received by the militants in the West, en écrivant, “I
am very glad that our experience has proved useful to French film-makers and has
not disappeared without a trace. . . . Having long choked on the bitterness of
defeat, I have now tasted the unfamiliar bitterness of victory.”54 Indeed, in his cor-
respondence with Pol Cèbe—who signed each letter “Medvedkinement” rather
than “amicalement”—Medvedkin encouraged the group, and also emphasized to
them the power of film to intercede in local concerns: “To see yourself, your
friends, your street on screen is always a disconcerting event in the life of anyone.
In our time we realized this quickly, and used it as the most powerful lever in the
search for genres of active political cinema.”55 The degree of Medvedkin’s influ-

Tret’iakov, “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” p. 69.
Ibid..

49.
50.
51. Medvedkin, quoted in Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin, p. 22.
52. Marker, quoted and translated in Alter, Chris Marker, p. 86.
53. Marker, quoted in ibid., p. 141.
54. Medvedkin, quoted in Crofts and Enzensberger, “Medvedkin,” p. 75.
55. Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin, p. 122.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

133

ence at Rhodiaceta is already manifest in Cèbe’s defense of Marker after the first
screening of À bientôt j’espère, recorded in La Charnière. En effet, Cèbe explicitly
evokes the factographic tropes of de-professionalization and the pervasive descrip-
tion of cinema as a “weapon”: “Maybe you believe that the audiovisual language,
like the written language, requires years of study, but we are convinced that this is
not the case. . . . We have so many things to say and we have a new way to say it, un
new medium, a new weapon.”

That the coercive ciné-train of Medvedkin—a lifelong Stalinist and propagan-
dist for the state that executed his former peers, including Meyerhold and
Tret’iakov—could be read as a figure of cultural self-determination in the French
1960s involved a historical misprision of no small significance.56 While factography, dans
the hands of Tret’iakov and Medvedkin, had been developed as a means of reconcil-
ing collective farmers to their new productive conditions, the French filmmakers and
workers seized upon these techniques to challenge the colonization of everyday life
by the logic of production. It was, donc, precisely the mythic distance separating
the reception of Medvedkin from the realities of state socialism that permitted the
recovery of the radical kernel of the Soviet factographic project, resistant to the
Stalinist call for idealizing images of “life as it is becoming, rather than life as it is.”57
For the Medvedkin Group, factography and operativism, as filtered through a partial
understanding of a unique moment in Medvedkin’s work, were seized upon for the
principles of deprofessionalization, situational contingency, the fixation of the fact,
simultaneous collective production and reception, and a conception of cinema as a
dialogic relation between the film and the filmed.58 In the ciné-train, Marker
glimpsed the possibility of exceeding the role of “well-intentioned explorer,” and to
move from a cinema of auteurism to one of autogestion.

The first collective film by the Besançon Medvedkin Group is Classe de lutte,
begun during the wildcat strikes and occupations of May 1968. The title—a rever-

Class of Struggle

56.
Dans 1993 Marker released The Last Bolshevik, a film that explores Medvedkin’s life as a means of
grappling with the history of Russian Communism from the revolutionary élan of October 1917 to the
cultural and political repression under Stalin to perestroika. The film, in many ways, also represents
Marker’s coming to terms with the excessive naïveté of the initial French reception of Medvedkin’s
project and with the place of the USSR within the European left’s imaginary.
On the resistant dimensions of factography, see Gough, “Radical Tourism.” A strong distinction
57.
between Marker’s mythic Medvedkin and the historical Medvedkin is developed in Kristian Feigelson,
“Regards Croisés Est/Ouest: L’histoire revisitée au cinéma (Medvedkine/Marker),” Théorème 6 (2002),
pp. 119–31. This description of Socialist Realism is borrowed from Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday
Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University
Presse, 1999), p. 9, quoted in Gough, “Radical Tourism,” p. 174.
58.
Benjamin Buchloh describes factography as instantiating “systems of representation/produc-
tion/distribution which would recognize the collective participation in the actual processes of produc-
tion of social wealth, systems which, like architecture in the past or cinema in the present, had estab-
lished conditions of simultaneous collective reception.” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to
Factography,” October 30 (Autumn 1984), p. 94.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

134

OCTOBER

sal of “lutte de classe” (class struggle) with dual
implications of a pedagogy of struggle and of a
class defined by its struggles—was, according to
Cèbe, itself a critique of representation, forgoing
“enormous fresco[es] on the class struggle” for a
factographic focus on local concerns.59 The
group, from the beginning, associated filmmak-
ing with the daily labor of militant organization
and the communal structure of a strike commit-
tee. Ainsi, the credits list in alphabetical order
forty-five auteurs, including the Besançon worker-
cinematographers (among them, subjects of À
bientôt j’espère such as Lièvremont, Maurivard, et
Henri Traforetti), Marker, Marret, the SLON
crew (including soundman Bonfanti and cinematographer Lhomme), and several
fellow travelers who did not participate directly in the film’s production ( Juliet
Berto, Godard, and Ivens, for example). Set apart in the credits, and evidently
responsible for most of the film’s production, are the names of Géo Binetruy, Pol
Cèbe, Bruno Muel, and the editor Simone Nedjma Scialom.60

Medvedkin Group.
Classe de lutte.
1968 –69. © ISKRA

Classe de lutte, like À bientôt j’espère, focuses on the subjective transformation
of a single figure as a metonym for wider changes in class consciousness. Le
film follows Suzanne Zedet , a young worker at the Yema watch factor y in
Besançon. She is introduced in footage shot in December 1967 for À bientôt
j’espère, expressing her desire to become a militant, but being told by her hus-
band that it would put unbearable strain on their already difficult family life.
Five months later, Zedet has joined the CGT and is filmed in front of a crowd
delivering an agitational speech in favor of a strike. Classe de lutte, donc,
seeks to rectify the major—and legitimate—critiques of À bientôt j’espère, namely,
its romanticism, its abstraction of quotidian struggle, et, most significantly, its
occlusion of the role of women in the militant syndicalist movement. Over a
montage of images of timepieces (including Dalí’s melting clocks), a voice-over
states that Besançon produces a third of all French watches, and that thirty-two
percent of the city’s active working population is composed of women: “This,
without humor, translates thusly: precision work requires an agile and docile
main, so the bosses of the clock factories make an appeal to little hands. Mais,
more and more, these little hands hold large banners.” The film cuts from shots

Pol Cèbe, “Le Groupe Medvedkine,” Cinéma 151 (Décembre 1970), p. 94.

59.
60. Marker’s role in the production of the Medvedkin Group films tends to be overstated in the lit-
erature, scant as it still is. It is important to clarify that although he worked closely with the collective
following its foundation, Marker was no more central a participant than any of the Rhodiaceta worker-
cinematographers or members of SLON. Bruno Muel attests that Cèbe was the primary editor of the
Group’s films, with Scialom’s assistance for Classe de lutte. Muel, “Les riches heures du groupe
Medvedkin,” p. 23.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

135

of women’s hands in a magazine advertisement
for Yema watches, to a close-up of Zedet’s
main, to the hands of a woman waving a flag in
a protest. Echoing Marker’s juxtaposition of
the exploited hands and the liberated hands in
À bientôt j’espère, this montage links with strik-
ing visual economy the role of women in the
circuits of consumption and production.

Throughout the film, the potent ial of
montage to link disparate images is employed to
emphasize the indivisibility of economic, politi-
cal, domestic, and cultural concerns in Zedet’s
lived experience. In one significant sequence
regarding the day-to-day labor that Zedet under-
takes as a union militant to break out of what
she calls the “individualism” imposed upon
worker s, images of family life, travail, et
activism are spliced together, accompanied by a
Spanish psychedelic rock song. The sequence
cuts rapidly between shots of Zedet speaking to
crowds, writing tracts, and establishing lines of
communicat ion among her co – worker s;
bet ween poster s advert ising a screening of
Ivens’s Terre d’Espagne “in solidarity with the
Spanish people” and ent reat ies to “Help
Vietnam”; between Zedet’s daily commute to
the Yema factory and the family life of her hus-
band and her child. The montage and the song
end with Zedet typing in her family home, avec
a poster for Brecht’s Homme pour Homme and
photos of her child on the wall, when a voice
off-camera asks her what she’s doing. She smiles
and replies, “Bien, je milite!»

One focal point for the politics of cinema
in Classe de lutte is therefore the technical
capacity of montage to integrate dialetically
the alienated shards of the lifeworld. Just as
important, cependant, is the Medvedkin Group’s
operativist emphasis on the potential of the
camera not simply to record a preexist ing,
extra-cinematic reality but to participate in its
transformation. In the opening scene of Classe

Medvedkin Group.
Classe de lutte.
1968 –69. © ISKRA.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

136

OCTOBER

de lutte, Zedet walks into the CCPPO, past an
array of placards and banners, and into a
back room where an editor (most likely
Scialom) works on an Atlas 16mm film-edit-
ing table under a poster of Fidel Castro. Le
editor is pictured splicing an interview with
Zedet together with a scene of crowds of
women in the demonstrations of May. Zedet
watches her flickering image on the screen
with evident interest and pleasure. A quick
cut reveals Géo Binetruy filming the t wo
women with a handheld camera. Cutt ing
back to Binetruy’s camera, the shot pans
from the editing table to a manifesto painted
on the wall of the room, framed like an inter-
title: “Cinema is not magic. It’s a technique
and a science. A technique born of a science
and put to the service of a will: the will that
the worker s have to liberate themselves.”
Classe de lutte begins with a self-reflexive
image of its own simultaneous collective pro-
duction and reception.

Effectively, the central subject of the
Medvedkin Group’s film is the operative entry
of cinema itself into the events and lives that
the film sought to document. De cette façon, le
films made by the Rhodiaceta worker-cine-
matographers radically expand upon the cri-
tique of documentary objectivity developed by
Marker since Le Joli Mai (1963). In this film,
Marker and his collaborator Lhomme exploit-
ed new developments in lightweight portable
film equipment (the handheld 16mm camera)
in order to capture the city of Paris and its
inhabitants in the summer of 1962, in the
wake of the massacre at Charonne and the
signing of the Évian peace accord. Against
documentary film’s aspiration to capture a
reality unaffected by its observation, Le Joli
Mai emphasizes t he filmic apparatus’s
ineluct able mediat ion of social realit y by

Top two images: Medvedkin Group.
Classe de lutte. 1968-69.
© ISKRA.
Bottom image: Marker and Marret.
À bientôt j’espère. 1967–68.
© ISKRA.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

137

employing disjunctive montage, critical voice-overs, and estranging camerawork.61
De même, À bientôt j’espère programmatically makes manifest the social dynamic
bet ween the filmmaker s and the filmed subject s—for example, when a
Rhodiaceta employee being interviewed in his kitchen gets up to go to work and
awkwardly shakes hands with each member of the crew behind the camera.

In contrast to Le Joli Mai, cependant, À bientôt j’espère is cut through with a
degree of authorial self-effacement, with Marker and Marret simplifying the dis-
junctive quality of montage and largely reneging on the critical relationship of
commentary to image. In a sense, the film’s willful asceticism before the task of
representing the struggles at Rhodiaceta evinces Marker’s confrontation with the
limits of the “cinematographic reality” subtending the practice of documentary:
the inevitable distance inscribed by the camera between the subject and the
object of representation. Inversement, the pervasive reflexivity of Classe de lutte is
less a modernist form of representation critique, and more a shift parallel to the
one described by Tret’iakov from journalism to operativism: “Working in this way
means that you can’t set yourself apart, without accountability, from the object of
labor. You can’t just observe the object. Plutôt, by constant work with it, you have
to become organically connected with the object.”62 Effectively, the labor of the
Medvedkin Group represents the attempt to forge just such an “operative rela-
tion,” and to accede from detached representation to “participation in the life of
the material itself.”63

The group systematically seeks to register the consequences of this operational
shift within the structure of the film itself, whether by reflecting on the processes of
cinematic production and reception, or by investigating the effects of this shift on
the order of subjectivity. In the latter mode, the film ends not with the disillusion-
ment of June 1968’s return to order, but with the liberatory consequences felt by its
participants in the longue durée. Zedet’s union activity during May results in a signifi-
cant pay cut, a demotion, and warnings from the directorate to keep politics and
work separate—though, bien sûr, the entire May movement was based on the cri-
tique of such false distinctions. Zedet emphasizes, cependant, that concurrently with
her political struggle she has won a new relationship to the field of culture. During
an interview in the CCPPO, in front of a poster of Picasso’s Portrait of Sylvette David in
a Green Armchair (1954), Cèbe, offscreen, suggests, “Tell me about Picasso.” Zedet

61.
Although Marker acerbically referred to cinéma vérité as “ciné ma verité” (ciné my truth), Le Joli
Mai could productively be compared to contemporaneous efforts to turn “the ethnographic gaze
back upon the métropole at the moment of decolonization,” as Tom McDonough describes Jean
Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (1961). McDonough offers a compelling account of
Chronique d’un été and of the French cinéma vérité project more generally from the point of view of a
comparison with the cinema of Guy Debord. Tom McDonough, “Calling from the Inside: Filmic
Topologies of the Everyday,” Grey Room 26 (Hiver 2007), p. 7. Citing Marker’s pun, Lupton also use-
fully distinguishes Le Joli Mai from cinéma vérité, specifically from Rouch and Morin’s project, dans
Lupton, Chris Marker, p. 84.
62.
63.

Tret’iakov, “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” p. 68.
Ibid., p. 69.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

138

OCTOBER

cites Jacques Prévert’s poem “La Lanterne
Magique de Picasso” (1944), and states that she
discovered culture at the same moment that she
discovered the workers’ movement. “Workers
believe,” she contends, “that poetry or painting
are not for them, we believe that it is reserved for
the bourgeoisie.” But, she continues, her con-
frontation with Picasso and Prévert proved to her
that poetry and art had a social meaning that
bore directly upon her own experience. She then
argues that practical struggles such as the union’s
fight for higher wages must be paired with cultur-
al struggle, and that a poem by Paul Éluard is just
as important as a discourse on politics. The inter-
voir, and the film, ends with Zedet recounting the significance of her discovery of
Maxim Gorky’s Mother in the factory library run by Cèbe.64

Medvedkin Group.
Classe de lutte.
1968–69. © ISKRA.

Potential Consciousness

Vertov, of all of them, he was the closest to you [Medvedkin] in terms of ambition
and sincerity. You would be endlessly compared to each other and sometimes
opposed. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Godard?” You fought on the same propaganda fronts,
you had the same enemies, which should be a good bond, you even once lived in the
same building. . . . And yet all testimonies confirm that in your whole lives you
barely exchanged a few words.

—Chris Marker, Le tombeau d’Alexandre
(The Last Bolshevik), 1993

Bien sûr, the Medvedkin Group was not alone in its claim for the relevance of
Soviet cinema in the French 1960s. In early 1969, following years of indifference to
Soviet film on the part of the circle orbiting the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Luc
Godard founded his own experiment in collective agitational filmmaking and adopt-
ed the name of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov.65 Vertov, who had famously proclaimed
the death of cinematography in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, developed a
vast arsenal of “intricate camera pyrotechnics,” in Leyda’s words, as a means of

64.
One should pause to note, if only in passing, the extreme anachronism of the set of coordinates
put forward by the Medvedkin Group as a historically available heritage for oppositional culture in the
late 1960s: the Communists Picasso and Éluard, the Prévert of the Popular Front, the canonical text of
Socialist Realist literature, and the ciné-train of a Soviet octogenarian.
65.
Cahiers du Cinéma’s relationship to Soviet film is complex and cannot adequately be dealt with
ici. Cependant, partly because of the journal’s Oedipal struggle with Georges Sadoul’s so-called
Stalinist criticism, it took until Cahiers du Cinéma’s issues on Eisenstein, published between April 1969
and February 1971, for the editors to explicitly reflect upon Soviet cinematic experiments. See Emilie
Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma (Londres: Verso Books, 2009), pp. 26, 65–66.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

139

remaking vision and, en effet, consciousness itself through the camera—just as society
would be remade through Communism.66 Vertov, donc, emblematized for
Godard the synthesis of formal and political revolution, and provided a cinematic
model with which to counter Marker’s claim on the legacy of Medvedkin.

With the founding of the Dziga Vertov Group, which was the culmination of a
period of increasingly explicit politicization (evident in the transition from La
Chinoise and Week-End [1967] to Le Gai Savoir and Un film comme les autres [1968]),
Godard sought to jettison the “bourgeois” auto-critique of cinema for a committed
cinematic critique of society. Toward this end, he partnered with the journalist and
student militant Jean-Pierre Gorin (editor, with Robert Linhart, Jacques-Alain Miller,
and Jacques Rancière, of the journal Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes) and undertook a col-
laborative project lasting until 1972 to make “political cinema politically.”67 For
Godard, the relationship with Gorin was founded on a productive contradiction
between the activist seeking new forms of communication and the jaded filmmaker
seeking to break out of avant-garde hermeticism: “one wanted to make cinema, le
other wanted to leave it.” Their project was “to try to make a new unity of these two
opposites, according to a Marxist concept.”68 Godard explains that the rupture of May
’68 revealed to him that his cinematographic work up to that point had merely repre-
sented an “individual revolt” and that it was necessary to “link” himself “to big social
movements.”69 However, he critiqued the “utopia” of an “egalitarian” model of pro-
duction, and retained creative control over the group’s films.70

Over the course of the next four years, the Vertov Group produced eight films
committed to expedient production and diffusion in militant circles for purposes agi-
tational and educational. The first two films, British Sounds/See You at Mao, an English-
language film on British political struggles, and Pravda, filmed in Prague, were made
dans 1969 with Jean-Henri Roger, a Marseillais militant, and the following four films (Le
Vent d’est, Luttes en Italie, the unreleased film Jusqu’à la victoire, and Vladimir et Rosa)
were conceived and filmed with Gorin between 1969 et 1971. The final film made
in collaboration with Gorin, Tout va bien (1972; accompanied that year by a pendant,
Letter to Jane), is a comparatively big-budget film starring Yves Montand and Jane
Fonda as bourgeois intellectuals (a filmmaker and a journalist, respectivement) dont
attempts to ally themselves with the working class end in disillusionment. In this way,
the film allegorizes the perceived failure of the Vertov Group’s model of political cin-
ema during the disappointments of the post-’68 years, a failure that Godard would
work through for the rest of his career.

66.
See Dziga Vertov, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, éd.
Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: Presse de l'Université de Californie, 1984), p. 7. Leyda,
Kino, p. 251. On Vertov’s “language of cinema,” see Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist:
Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera,” in The Essential Cinema, éd. P.. Adams Sitney (New York: New York
Presse universitaire, 1975), pp. 95–111, and more recently, Malcolm Turvey, “City Symphony and Man with
a Movie Camera,” in The Filming of Modern Life (Cambridge, Mass.: AVEC Presse, 2011), pp. 135–61.
Jean-Luc Godard, “Le Groupe ‘Dziga Vertov,’” Cinéma 151 (Décembre 1970), p. 82.
67.
Ibid..
68.
Ibid., p. 83.
69.
Ibid., pp. 86–87.
70.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140

OCTOBER

In a rare acknowledgement, Godard credits Marker’s ciné-tracts, produced in

May ’68, as having provided the initial model for the Vertov Group:

The ciné-tracts are Chris Marker’s idea. The video camera and all these
short films, it was a simple and cheap means to make political cinema
for a section d’entreprise or an action-committee. . . . Pour, in the same way
as in the classroom, we re-write the films with students, and likewise I
believe we must make films with those who watch them.71

With the Vertov Group’s goal to remake the fundamental relations of cine-
matic production and reception, Godard faced a set of contradictions similar to
those that Marker encountered in Besançon: how could cinema construct an
image of “the people” that would exceed mere documentation? How could cine-
ma actively participate in forming a collectivity? And what historical value might
the repertoire of avant-garde tactics in film—and the modernist paradigm of self-
reflexivity itself—still possess in the face of the exigencies of class struggle?

The profound difference between the positions that the two filmmakers
would develop in response to these questions can already be glimpsed in an inter-
view given by Godard in the months following the March 1967 str ikes at
Rhodiaceta. Ici, Godard speaks candidly of the unbridgeable separation
between the struggles of the proletariat and the specific demands of the cinemat-
ic medium, and implicitly cites Marker’s work at Rhodiaceta as a counterexample:

[T]he one movie that really ought to have been made in France this
year—on this point [Philippe] Sollers and I are in complete agree-
ment—is a movie on the strikes at Rhodiaceta. . . . The thing is, once
again, the men who know film can’t speak the language of strikes and
the men who know strikes are better at talking Oury than Resnais or
Barnett. . . . If it were made by a movie-maker, it wouldn’t be the movie
that should have been made. And if it were made by the workers
themselves—who, from a technical point of view, could very well
make it, if someone gave them a camera and a guy to help them out a
bit—it still wouldn’t give as accurate a picture of them, from the cul-
tural point of view, as the one they give when they’re on the picket-
lines. That’s where the gap lies.72

Jean-Paul Fargier and Bernard Sizaire, “Deux Heures avec Jean-Luc Godard,” Tribune Socialiste
71.
396 ( Janvier 23, 1969), p. 18, reprinted in Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, éd. Alain
Bergala (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1985), p. 332.
72.
Godard, “Struggle on Two Fronts: A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard,” Film Quarterly 21, Non. 2
(Winter 1968–Winter 1969), pp. 21–22. Although the Medvedkin Group would not be founded until six
months after this interview was first published in Cahiers du Cinéma in October 1967, it is almost inconceiv-
able that Godard would not have known of Marker’s involvement at Rhodiaceta. Not only had the CCPPO
screened La Chinoise, but the premiere of Loin du Vietnam, to which Godard contributed a sequence, était
held in Besançon in October 1967 while Marker was filming À bientôt j’espère. Plus loin, his credit in Classe de
lutte indicates a period of rapprochement or mutual regard between the two directors—one that would
end or at least be put under strain with the foundation of the Groupe Dziga Vertov.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

141

Godard identifies a “gap” between the forms of expression proper to the
filmmaker and to the working class. The highly specialized language of the cinema
is profoundly alien to that of the factory, and a film on the strikes would risk reify-
ing or distorting the class struggle. Inversement, those who speak the “language of
strikes” lack the training and fluency to translate the pressing issues of a labor dis-
pute onto celluloid, and were they to try, they would risk falsifying their own expe-
rience in the process.

The strategies that Godard deployed in the Vertov Group to address this gap
were developed in a dialogical relation with Marker’s work, one just as frequently
disavowed as stated explicitly. While in January 1969 he affirms the influence of
Marker’s ciné-tracts, in the Vertov Group film Pravda, filmed in Prague during
Mars 1969, Godard critiques Marker’s involvement at Rhodiaceta. Reading a fic-
tional letter from Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg, a voice-over intones,

Like Delacroix in Algiers or Chris Marker in the strike-torn factories of
Rhodiaceta. The New York Times and Le Monde call it news. And I agree
with you, Rose, that it isn’t enough. Why? Because it’s only the knowl-
edge perceived by our senses. Now one has to make the effort to rise
above this perceptual knowledge. One needs to struggle to transform it
into rational knowledge.73

With the conversation between Lenin and Luxemburg, Godard formulates his
cinematic opposition to Marker’s project through an allegorical reconciliation of two
historically opposed forms of communism: where Luxemburg stands for the affirma-
tion of revolutionary creativity from below, Lenin represents its formalization in the
advanced “scientific” theory and centralized power of the party apparatus.
Concretizing his earlier stance on the fissure between the working class and the
artist/intellectual, Godard charges Marker with an exoticism of the proletarian other
and with naive pretensions to documentary realism.74 By rephrasing the pedagogical
metaphor of the ciné-tract cited above, Godard argues that the task of militant cinema
would be to translate the working class’s primary or phenomenological experience of
their social world into rational knowledge of social contradiction. In this way, Godard
imagines a Leninist intellectual vanguard theoretically prior to its fall into discipli-
nary bureaucracy, a dialectical materialism with an organic connection to the work-
ing class.75 For his part, Marker recalled decades later his desire to produce a film
consisting of an hourlong plan fixe of Godard and Cèbe sitting in silence across a

Dialogue translated in James Roy MacBean, “Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group: Film and

73.
Dialectics,” Film Quarterly 26, Non. 1 (Autumn 1972), pp. 35–36.
74. MacBean summarizes Godard’s view of the difference between his and Marker’s projects in this
chemin, “Godard and Gorin have repeatedly emphasized that unlike other militant film groups such as . . .
Chris Marker’s SLON . . the Dziga Vertov Group rejects the ‘reflection of reality’ notion of the cinema
and therefore refuses the ‘go out and get footage’ approach . . . which invariably emphasizes the ‘you
are there’ immediacy quality of events at the expense of a thorough analysis of the causes, effects, rela-
tions and contradictions of events.” MacBean, “Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group,” p. 34.
75.
Spring and of Moscow’s bureaucratic Communism. See ibid., p. 36.

En effet, Pravda was conceived as a critique of both the so-called “revisionism” of the Prague

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

142

OCTOBER

table from each other. This film, in Marker’s words, would capture “the first time in
his life Godard laid eyes on a worker,” and picture the polarization between the intel-
lectual and the worker reinforced by the Vertov Group.76 More than simply anecdotal
relics of a cinematographic rivalry, these mutual critiques delineate the rift separat-
ing the Medvedkin Group from the Vertov Group, drawn along the division of com-
petences structuring the field of culture in class society.

Effectively, the determining question of the Vertov Group films was how to
establish solidarity with the working class without reneging on the highly differentiat-
ed form of epistemological critique developed by avant-garde film. Godard’s militant
films insistently take as their point of departure the repertoire of formal tactics that
he had developed over the course of the previous decade, namely those of “narrative
intransitivity, estrangement, foregrounding, multiple diegesis, aperture, unpleasure,
reality,” as enumerated by Peter Wollen in 1972.77 Cependant, these strategies do not
remain unaltered by the demands of militancy; rather, in the Vertov Group films,
each is systematically imbued with overt political signification. Par exemple, le
opening shot of British Sounds (1969) references the famous eight-minute continuous
tracking shot of a traffic jam from Week-End, soundtracked with deafening car horns
and ending with mutilated bodies strewn across the road. British Sounds, inversement,
opens with a ten-minute continuous tracking shot of the production line in a British
auto-manufacturing plant, accompanied by screeching mechanical sounds and a
voiceover reading passages by Marx on the alienation of labor. Regarding the
extreme and unrelenting volume of the factory sound, Godard stated, “The workers
have to listen to that sound all day, every day, for weeks, mois, and years, but bour-
geois audiences can’t stand to listen to it for more than a few seconds.”78 Whereas the
traffic jam in Week-End mapped the demolition of cinematic convention onto the
apocalyptic decrepitude of consumer society, British Sounds associates the camera with
the revelation of the conditions of production under advanced industrial capitalism.
De même, from the intertitles of Vivre sa vie (1962) to the black screen of Le Gai
Savoir (1968) Godard increasingly explored the use of blank sequences—the intersti-
tial space between shots—that no longer served a merely grammatical role as cine-
matic “punctuation marks” (transitioning between sequences and expressing the pas-
sage of time), but that dialectically engaged with cinematic structure, as Noël Burch
argues.79 For Gilles Deleuze, following Burch, this practice severed montage from its
traditional role of establishing rational linkages and sensory-motor continuity, et

76. Marker, quoted in Min Lee, “Red Skies: Joining Forces with the Militant Collective SLON,” Film
Comment 39, Non. 4 ( July–August 2003), p. 39. Marker’s scenario is complicated by an anecdote related
by Bruno Muel, who recalls Cèbe’s account of occasional dinners with Godard in Paris, which would
usually be spent in amicable silence. Muel, “Les riches heures du groupe Medvedkine,” p. 22.
Peter Wollen, “Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est,” Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972), p. 6.
77.
Godard, quoted in Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (Nouveau
78.
York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), p. 345.
79.
Burch writes, “The absence of an image on the screen traditionally constitutes a simple ‘punctu-
ation mark’ used to ‘signify’ the passage of time in the same way a dissolve does.” Conversely, dans
Godard’s use of the blank, “the opposition of an image and its absence” assumes a dialectical role as
“an essential structural element.” Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. voie (New York:
Praeger, 1973), pp. 56–7, 60.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

143

instead emphasized the purely disjunctive value of the filmic interstice. In Deleuze’s
words, “the interval is set free, the interstice becomes irreducible and stands on its
own.”80 In this view, the stretches of blank white or black screen, which display noth-
ing but the distance between images, are the ciphers of materialist cinematic prac-
tice at its limits. Cependant, in the Vertov Group films, this degree zero of cinema is
recuperated as a source of positive and didactic meaning.81 In a programmatic man-
ner, Godard metaphorically reconceives the cinematic frame as a blackboard in a
classroom, an empty surface upon which militant students will inscribe the theory of
revolution. In British Sounds, over a scene of student activists making posters, a voice-
over states:

During the projection of an imperialist film, the screen sells the voice of
the boss to the viewer, the voice caresses and beats into submission.
During the projection of a revisionist film, the screen is the loudspeaker
for a voice delegated by the people which is no longer the voice of the
people. In silence people see their own disfigured face. During the pro-
jection of a militant film, the screen is no more than a blackboard, le
wall of a school offering concrete analysis of a concrete situation. In front
of that screen, the living soul of Marxism, the students criticize, struggle,
and transform.

If the black frame of avant-garde film reduced the cinematic medium to an
empty set, thus providing, in Deleuze’s words, a “pedagogy of the image,” in the
Vertov Group films the black frame is metaphorized into the militant blackboard,
providing a pedagogy of revolution.82 “So, for once, this black screen really means
something,” as the narrator states in Vladimir et Rosa (1970).83

In the trope of the screen as the “living soul of Marxism,” Godard makes a
claim for the militant film as the structural correlate within culture of the van-
guard party within politics. As explicitly stated in Vladimir et Rosa—“Ours is a van-
guard party,” the narrator proclaims—the Vertov Group adopts the Leninist posi-

A similar shift could be traced from Godard’s formula of coloristic materialism (“it’s not blood,

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Londres:

80.
Athlone, 1989), p. 277.
81.
it’s red”) to the Maoist metaphorics of red in the Vertov Group films.
82.
“There is a pedagogy of the image, especially in Godard . . . when the frame serves as an opaque
surface of information, sometimes blurred by saturation, sometimes reduced to the empty set, to the
white or black screen.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Londres: Athlone, 1986), p. 13.
83.
The black screen as a site of metaphorical projection is deployed differently in Vladimir et Rosa, un
film about the distinction between theory and practice in cinema and in revolution that ostensibly por-
trays the famous 1969 trial of the “Chicago Eight.” In a sequence regarding the severance of Black
Panther militant Bobby Seale’s trial after Seale is held in contempt of court, Godard employs the blank
as a means of imaging Seale’s very removal from visibility before the law. In a voice-over accompanying
a black screen, Godard links the “black leader” of cinema with the “black leader” of the Black Power
mouvement, arguing that this was “not a black image, but an image of a Black.” Godard and Jean-Pierre
Gorin, “À Propos de Vladimir et Rosa,” in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, éd. Nicole Brenez (Paris: Centre
Georges Pompidou, 2006), p. 163.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

144

OCTOBER

tion that the “role of the vanguard fighter
can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided
by an advanced theory.”84 As with the rela-
tionship established by Lenin between the
working class and the advanced theoretical
position of the party, Godard’s militant films
attempt to translate “the People’s” experi-
ence into a form of rational knowledge—
exceeding mere documentation for “a con-
crete analysis of a concrete situation”—and,
at the same time, to teach that same “People”
about their own experience. Godard aligns
the formal innovations of “vanguard” cinema
with the theoretical positions of the “van-
guard” militant student groupuscules, dont
tract s he appropr iated for dialogue. Mais
Godard found that the people never quite
seemed to recognize themselves on the
blackboard of militant cinema. The class con-
sciousness (and the cinematic tastes) of the
masses inevitably lagged behind the van-
guard works presenting to them the rational
knowledge of their own objective conditions;
as Godard lamented in Pravda, “workers talk
like Henry Ford, not the Black Panthers.”

This delay or discrepancy between the
proletariat in theory and the proletariat in
practice—a gap that both the Vertov Group
and the Medvedkin Group faced—has a long
history in Marxist thought as the trope of
“potential consciousness,” stretching from
Marx’s The Holy Family (1844) to Lukács to
the post war French philosopher Lucien
Goldmann. For Marx, the actually existing
consciousness of the proletariat as a class
had to be distinguished from the historical

Dziga Vertov Group.
British Sounds/See
You at Mao. 1969.

84.
Vladimir Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?,” in Essential Works of Lenin, éd. Henry M. Christman (Nouveau
York: Dover Publications, 1987), p. 70. Plus loin, for Lenin, “By educating the workers’ party, Marxism edu-
cates the vanguard of the proletariat which is capable of assuming power and of leading the whole people
to socialism, of directing and organizing the new order, of being the teacher, guide, and leader of all the
toiling and exploited in the task of building up their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the
bourgeoisie.” Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in Essential Works of Lenin, p. 288.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

145

disposition of this same class: “it is not a question of what this or that proletarian,
or even the whole proletariat, regards as its aim at the moment. It is a question of
what the proletariat is and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be
compelled to do.”85 Following Marx, Lukács argues, “Class consciousness consists
in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ (zugerechnet) to a par-
ticular typical position in the process of production. This consciousness is, là-
fore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single indi-
viduals who make up the class.”86 To distinguish the “actual, psychological state of
consciousness of the proletariat” (that is to say, a false consciousness mystified by
ideology and dulled by suffering) from its potential consciousness (the historical
awareness of its revolutionary mission) est, for Lukács, precisely the task of dialecti-
cal materialism.87 Consequently, the promise of revolutionary change depends
upon “closing the gap between the psychological consciousness and the imputed
un,” a synthesis achieved in the vanguard party.88

This is why, for Lucien Goldmann, a philosopher whose influence in the
1950s and 1960s weighed heavily on francophone Marxist artists and intellectuals
such as Marcel Broodthaers and Guy Debord, “the possible is the fundamental cate-
gory for understanding human history.”89 In his essay “The Revolt of the Arts and
Letters in Advanced Civilizations,» (1968) which discusses Godard’s Le Mépris
(Contempt) (1963) and Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (1957), Goldmann offers a remark-
ably apposite metaphor for differentiating the Vertov and Medvedkin groups,
arguing that the dialectical philosopher or historian is not concerned primarily
with developing “the most exact and meticulous possible photography of the exist-
ing society” but rather with isolating “the potential (virtuelles) developing tenden-
cies oriented toward overcoming that society.”90 Following Lukács, Goldmann’s
cultural criticism identifies the fundamental dialectic of class consciousness as
that between the “class-in-itself” and the “class-for-itself.”91 Where the class-in-itself
represents the actually existing “empirical” consciousness of the proletariat as a

Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 51.
Ibid., p. 74.
Ibid..
Lucien Goldmann, “The Revolt of the Arts and Letters in Advanced Civilizations,” in Cultural

85.
Karl Marx, “The Holy Family,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, éd. et
trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 368. Translation
modified as quoted in Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, éd. Andrew Parker, trans. John
Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 80.
86 .
87.
88.
89.
Creation in Modern Society, trans. Bart Grahl (St. Louis: Telos, 1976), p. 57.
Ibid..
90.
91.
Lucien Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy, trans. Hayden V. White and Robert
Anchor (Londres: Cape Press, 1969), pp. 118–19. The difference between the in-itself and the for-itself
was explored at length in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, dans lequel, as Martin Jay explains, “the ‘in-itself’
was fully self-sufficient, a completed positivity that was identical with itself, [alors que] the ‘for itself’ was
totally dependent on what it was not and yet desired to be. Rather than identity, it implied non-identi-
cal difference.” Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas
(Berkeley: Presse de l'Université de Californie, 1984), p. 338.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

146

OCTOBER

social group defined by its penury, the class-for-itself represents the potential revo-
lutionary orientation of this class toward its simultaneous self-abolition and real-
ization in the process of ushering in a classless society.

In Goldmann’s schema, it is the historically significant work of art or philoso-
phy that acts from within this aporia. In this sense, the role of the artist or philoso-
pher is to embody the “maximum of potential consciousness” of a class, to express its
worldview. Goldmann argues,

World-views are social facts. Great philosophical and artistic works rep-
resent the coherent and adequate expressions of these world-views. Comme
tel, they are at once individual and social expressions, their content
being determined by the maximum of potential consciousness of the group,
of the social class in general, and their form being determined by the
content for which the writer or thinker finds an adequate expression.92

The worldview of a class thus finds its authentic voice, its “coherent, excep-
tional expression, in great works of philosophy and art, or even in the lives of cer-
tain exceptional individuals. (The latter plane corresponds more or less to the
maximum of potential consciousness.)”93 In contrast to Goldmann’s avowedly
“social” model of subjectivity as a “transindividual” construction,94 his cultural
concept of maximum potential consciousness reaffirms a mythology of the artist
as exceptional individual. Plus loin, his theory of culture effectively substitutes the
advanced work of art for the role of the Communist vanguard party as the embod-
iment of an authentic historicity that remains unconscious in the rest of the social
monde. In this substitution, a number of contradictions are intensified. The maxi-
mum potential consciousness of the proletariat must paradoxically come from
outside its own ranks, from a professional class of almost exclusively bourgeois
artistes; et, being that the working class’s ideal consciousness is by necessity of its
own disappearance, this class consciousness would approach the metaphysical
condition of a presence that can only assert itself as absence. For Jacques
Rancière, this model invokes an impossible paradox: “It is too hard a task, even for
the best dialecticians, to prove to communist proletarians that they are not com-
munist proletarians by invoking a communist proletariat whose only fault is that it
does not yet exist.”95

In Godard’s view, the Medvedkin Group’s project of cinematic de-specializa-
tion was subtended by a credulous faith in cinema as a putatively unmediated tech-
nique that could simply be transferred from the bourgeoisie to the working class.

Goldmann, Human Sciences and Philosophy, p. 129.
92.
Ibid., p. 130.
93.
Goldmann argues, Par exemple, “Every manifestation is the work of its individual author and expresses
94.
his thought and his way of feeling, but these ways of thinking and feeling are not independent entities with respect to
the actions and behavior of other men. They exist and may be understood only in terms of their inter-subjective rela-
tions which give them their whole tenor and richness.” Emphasis in the original. Ibid., p. 128.
95.

Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, p. 85.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

147

Were the camera to fall into the hands of the people, they would at best merely
reflect their own alienated consciousness. Inversement, in the isomorphism of the
blank screen and the militant blackboard, the Vertov Group posits that the tactics of
cinematic negation, intransitivity, and estrangement are the adequate and appropri-
ate means to represent the potential consciousness of a class destined to abolish
lui-même. As the Vertov Group proclaims in British Sounds, militant cinema “doesn’t
mean bringing films to the people, but making films from and through the people.”
While Godard conceived of militant film as the vanguard expression of the working
class’s revolutionary sublation, his model also depended on and reinforced a separa-
tion between the maximum potential consciousness of the working class and its
“empirical” life context. Pour, as Godard laments, the proletariat inevitably prefers
the popular comedies of Gérard Oury or, at best, the “revisionist” cinema of the
“bourgeois” Eisenstein to the school lessons of militant film.96

The divergent claims made by Marker and by Godard for the possible legacy
of Soviet film reflect their polarized responses to the dialectics of class conscious-
ness. Godard nominally adopted Vertov because of his cinematic mission “to open
[people’s] eyes and to show the world in the name of the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat.”97 Marker, inversement, turned to Medvedkin because “he had put the cam-
era in the hands of the people” so they could “make films to show things as they
felt them to be from their own experience.”98 On the one side, a project that
sought to transform the inchoate consciousness of “the People” into the rational
cinematic knowledge of their potential liberation, et, on the other, a challenge
to the structuring principles of culture and to the class division between those
who have the power to speak and those who do not.

Rencontres

If, as Godard contended, the Medvedkin Group did not accept the task of rep-
resenting the proletariat-for-itself, c'est à dire., of portraying its potential to be realized in a
post-revolutionary future, neither did the collective affirm the converse position and
hypostatize the proletariat-in-itself by asserting that class identity had stable contours
that could be empirically described and valorized only by card-carrying members.
Plutôt, the Medvedkin Group “unworked” integral categories of identity through a
political claim to sectors of experience previously deemed inaccessible to a working

96.
In an interview regarding the Vertov Group, Godard argues, “We took Vertov’s name not in
order to apply his program, but to take him as a flag-bearer in relation to Eisenstein, OMS… is already a
revisionist filmmaker. . . . The only films that the proletarians truly accept today are still [Eisenstein’s
Battleship] Potemkin or [Herbert J. Biberman’s] The Salt of the Earth: these are the only films that touch
them profoundly, the film of a bourgeois carried along by the revolution and that of a liberal
Américain. . . . [Even if] this boosts [the proletarian’s] morale, it gives him no indication of the politi-
cal forces at play where he is struggling.” Godard, “Le Groupe ‘Dziga Vertov,’” pp. 82, 85.
97.
98. Marker, “Le ciné-ours,” p. 4.

Ibid., p. 82.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

148

OCTOBER

class that had its essential nature and prospects rooted exclusively in labor.
Par conséquent, in the “impossible identification”99 between Parisian filmmakers and
striking workers from Besançon, and in the alternate circuits of production and dis-
tribution established by SLON, the Medvedkin Group is intrinsically bound up with
the most radical dimension of the contestations of May 1968. Spécifiquement, the films of
the Medvedkin Group are determined at the level of production and reception by
what Kristin Ross describes as the pervasive logic running through the general strike,
occupations, and demonstrations that overtook Paris for nearly an entire month:
that of the rencontre, or encounter. For Ross, the rencontres that proliferated in May—
epitomized by the Comité d’Action Travailleur/Étudiant, which invited workers into the
occupied Sorbonne and students into the factories in order to establish common
social spaces of discussion—consisted of

meetings that were neither magical nor mythical but simply the experi-
ence of incessantly running into people that social, cultural, or profes-
sional divisions had previously kept one from meeting up with, little
events that produced the sense that those mediations or social com-
partments had simply withered away.100

The rencontre, thus, did not represent what Nancy describes as the typical
conception of community as a “project of fusion, or in some general way a produc-
tive or operative project.”101 Rather than aim toward the abolition of difference or
the affirmation of identity, as Ross argues, these meetings sought “to contest the
domain of the expert, [et] to disrupt the system of naturalized spheres of com-
petence.”102 In the ebullient communication between workers and intellectuals,
artists and militants, a form of community was organized that contested tradition-
al separations between specialized social sectors, yet rejected assimilation into any
mythically coherent class, mass, or party. It is firmly within this historical moment,
with all its vicissitudes, that the Medvedkin Group must be situated.

During the month of May, cependant, the organs of the official left, especially
the CGT and the PCF, rejected the union between students and workers as a dan-
gerous form of sociological ataxia.103 For example, adopting the language of reac-

99.
For Rancière, political subjectivization almost always involves such an “impossible identification.”
Giving the example of the May slogan “We are all German Jews,” Rancière writes, “We could act as political
subjects in the interval or the gap between two identities, neither of which we could assume.” Jacques
Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” October 61 (Été 1992), p. 61.
100. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, p. 103.
101. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 15.
102. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, p. 6.
103.
For Guy Debord, the unions and the party contributed more to the retour à l’ordre than could
any amount of police repression. According to Debord, the institutions of the left conceived of “a sort
of being-in-himself worker who, by definition, would exist only in his own factory, où . . . le
Stalinists would force him to keep silent,” and therefore undermined “the essential need whose vital
urgency was felt by so many workers in May: the need for coordination and communication of strug-
gles and ideas, starting from bases of free encounter outside their union-policed factories.” Situationist
International, “The Beginning of an Era,” in The Situationist International Anthology, éd. and trans. Ken
Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), p. 239.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”

149

tion, the PCF echoed de Gaulle in labeling students “pègres.”104 Likewise, it was pri-
marily the left bureaucracy that instigated the dissolution of the Besançon
Medvedkin Group. Medvedkin Group members Binetruy and Traforetti recall
being confronted by local PCF representatives who demanded that they stop mak-
ing films in order to engage in more “serious” militant activity: “It wasn’t the con-
tent of the films that was aimed at. The more serious transgression was that they
accepted working with ‘intellos’ without going through the Party’s hierarchical
structures. ‘Intellos,’ even worse, from Paris.”105 As a result of this confrontation,
certain members of the Medvedkin Group left the Communist Party, while others
abandoned their cinematic experiments to entrench themselves within the tradi-
tional institutions of working-class representation.106 The divisions were just as vir-
ulent on the side of the Parisian intellos. Marker recalls how forcefully the PCF
rejected the group’s activities and how his erstwhile collaborator, the director
Mario Marret, left the group in order to start a parallel project linked directly to
the Communist Party. Marker emphasizes the “langue de bois,” or stereotyped
part y- speak, of these films as opposed to the libert y of expression in the
Medvedkin Group.107 At the heart of the conflict was the implicit challenge pre-
sented to the ideology of the party—centered as it was on a fetishization of labor
and a mythical conception of “the worker” as a synecdoche of a homogeneous
class, of which the party was the privileged representation—by the rencontre
between artists and workers, who all of a sudden refused to be ventriloquized and
demanded to speak for themselves.

For a worker to claim the right to create—to theoretically “unalienated”
labor—was a gesture as threatening to the factory bosses as it was to the official
organs of the left, with their vision of the worker acceding to a state of being-in-oneself
through work. Regarding this form of sociological indeterminacy, Rancière argues that
“perhaps the truly dangerous classes are . . . the migrants who move at the border
between classes, individuals and groups who develop capabilities within themselves
which are useless for the improvement of their material lives and which in fact are
liable to make them despise material concerns.”108 Further, for Rancière, “Working-
class emancipation was not the affirmation of values specific to the world of labor. Il
was a rupture in the order of things that founded these ‘values,’ a rupture in the tra-

104. Ross cites an editorial in the Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité that describes protesters
as “pègres,” which she translates as “riff-raff, scum, the underworld.” See Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives,
p. 107–8.
105. Recounted in ISKRA, p. 37.
106. Georges Maurivard recalls that during the strikes of 1967, the party and unions openly wel-
comed student groups and filmmakers, though “this all changed in 1968.” Maurivard claims that the
PCF was “afraid of the dynamic of this period” and told the Medvedkin Group to stop associating with
“leftists” (gauchistes) such as Marker. Maurivard, “ ‘Classes de Lutte,’ luttes de classes,” pp. 96–97.
107. Marker, “Pour Mario,” in ISKRA, p. 12.
108.
Jacques Rancière, “Good Times, or Pleasure at the Barriers,” in Voices of the People: The Social Life
of ‘La Sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire, éd. Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas, trans. John Moore
(New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 49.

D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d

F
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
je
r
e
c
t
.

je
t
.

e
d
toi
o
c
t
o
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d

F
/

d
o

je
/

1
0
1
1
6
2
Ô
C
T
Ô
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
1
7
5
3
5
4
0
o
c
t
o
_
un
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

150

OCTOBER

ditional division [partage] assigning the privilege of thought to some and the tasks of
production to others.”109 Binetruy affirms this rupture, recalling that while initially
wary of “these Parisians who came stuffed with film and cameras,” he quickly realized
that “they did not come to teach us any lessons, but rather to transmit technical train-
ing that would liberate our spirits through our eyes. Once you have put your eyes
behind a camera, you are no longer the same man, your perspective has changed.”110
The consequences of this perspectival shift were explored in the subsequent
films made by the Besançon Medvedkin Group before its dissolution in 1971 et le
departure of Cèbe in 1970 to found a second Medvedkin Group at a Peugeot factory
in Sochaux-Montbéliard, which would continue until 1975. These films range from a
series of short ciné-tracts entitled Nouvelle Société (1969–1970), which sought to counter
Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas’s harmonious vision of a renewed French
society; to Lettre à mon ami Pol Cèbe (1971), a radically discrepant and self-reflexive film
made by Rhodia laborers in a car en route to screen Classe de lutte at a factory in Lille;
and to Le Traîneau-échelle (1971), a montage of détourned photos, illustrations, et
film-reels accompanied by a poem written by a young worker, Jean-Pierre Thiébaud,
which dispenses with the languages of agitation and documentary altogether to
investigate the mnemonic potential of sound-image relationships.

If the form of cultural politics “from below” that the Medvedkin Group prac-
ticed was first developed by their namesake as part of a state-sponsored project of
social engineering, the recovery of factography in the 1960s paradoxically propelled
the group outside the bounds of the Communist bureaucracy. En effet, in their chal-
lenge to sedimented divisions of competence and consciousness, the Communism of
the Medvedkin Group approaches Maurice Blanchot’s definition, written in the
throes of May: “Communism is what excludes (and excludes itself from) any already
constituted community.”111 The Medvedkin Group excluded itself not only from the
traditional institutions of working-class representation but also from those of culture
conceived as a compensatory promesse de bonheur serving to stabilize the excesses of
capitalism—a model exemplified today by the sham reconciliations proffered by
Sarkozy. The cinematic debate between the Vertov and Medvedkin groups on the
social role of the intellectual emerged from the shared conviction that this concep-
tion of culture was no longer historically tenable amid the various challenges to spe-
cialization and to social atomization put forth by the CCPPO, among many others.
Rather than deferring the utopian universalization of creativity into a potential
postrevolutionary future, Marker and the worker-cinematographers at Rhodiaceta
claimed that the operative entry into culture of a class of people previously denied
access to it constituted not simply an intervention into the superstructure but the
destabilization of a social order based upon the division of labor.

ISKRA, p. 5.

109. Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, p. 219.
110.
111. Maurice Blanchot, “[Communism Without Heirs],” in Maurice Blanchot: Political Writings,
1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 93.