• Broken barricades - La Commune is history in the making by Chris Fujiwara (Boston Phoenix)
• La Commune (Paris, 1871) by Chris Fujiwara
• In the hot-house of revolution by Stephen Philip
• The Revolution Is Televised - Anarchy Then and Now by J. Hoberman (Village Voice)
• Ever wonder how television would have covered the Civil War or the American Revolution? (New York Post)
• It's Paris in 1871, and You Are There by Dave Kehr (New York Times)
• La Commune (Christian Science Monitor)
• La Commune by Victoria E. Thompson (Arizona State University, for H-France)
• La Commune (Paris 1871) by Eddie Cockrell (Variety)

The Boston Phoenix (Wed, Jun. 05 2002)

Broken barricades

La Commune is history in the making BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

ACKNOWLEDGING THE CAMERA: Watkin's actors pursue a double life as both actor and character

The Paris Commune is a touchstone in the history of democracy. On March 26, 1871, still defiant after enduring five months of a Prussian siege, and refusing to accept the terms of the surrender negotiated by the French national government, the citizens of Paris voted for self-government. They formed a new municipal council - the Commune - comprising delegates from various backgrounds, including substantial numbers of manual workers and representatives of the labor movement as well as members of the middle class.

The Commune passed several reforms: rents that had gone unpaid during the period were cancelled; a three-year delay was granted for the payment of outstanding bills; unemployment exchanges were set up; night work for bakers was abolished; trade unions and workers' cooperatives were allowed to take over and restart factories that had been deserted by their owners; workers who had pawned their tools during the siege were allowed to retrieve them at no charge. The education system was freed from church control, and committees were formed to improve women's education.

On May 21, government troops re-entered Paris, storming through the Communards' street barricades and massacring the defenders. The massacres continued even after the total collapse of the Commune. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Parisians were killed over the course of what became known as "the bloody week."

A popular movement that didn't have the time or the conditions to become a revolution, the Commune was organized anarchically, without central authority and without coordination of military activities. It was less a government than a series of improvisations seeking to discover a new society and new forms of social administration.

Peter Watkins's stunning six-hour La Commune (Paris, 1871) captures the spirit of its subject. The film was shot in an abandoned factory redesigned as a set of mutually connecting spaces whose status as interior or exterior is uncertain. The overheated atmosphere of heightened unreality brings to mind the ceilinged open spaces of another great film about French democracy, Jean Renoir's Diary of a Chambermaid. Acknowledging the camera, Watkins's actors (playing both historical and fictional roles) don't so much step out of character as pursue a double life as both actor and character. In the film's second half, historical re-creations and invented but plausible situations give way increasingly to scenes in which the actors, remaining in their 1871 costumes but speaking as people of 1999, analyze the lessons and legacy of the Commune and discuss how society has changed in the intervening 128 years.

One of the film's main conceits is to have two rival TV networks - one pro-Commune and the other pro-national government - cover the events. The anachronism is a push-pull device that's meant both to help us put ourselves in the period and to get us to question how the media function today.

La Commune was shot in 13 days - a rapid schedule for a normal feature and amazing for a six-hour film. Its best moments convey the frayed-nerves extremity everyone involved must have felt. And the sense of excessive haste suits the subject. The Paris Commune lasted only some 60 days. Watching Watkins's film, you are always aware of this time limit looming at the other end of the adventure. He uses the time limit as a source of energy.

The film's best scenes come in its first and last hours. There's the tremendous, stirring long take in which the camera rushes after a group of Montmartre women into a square where they face government troops sent to seize the Parisians' artillery. There's the long Women's Union meeting in which the actors debate work and free time. And the fight-to-the-death scenes at the barricades, where the actors are asked "What would you do today?" or are pressed to defend their characters' actions.

Peter Watkins's approach to history is to make its representation coincide with reflection on it, to film, together with the re-enactment, the idea - what history means for us today. He refuses to separate the act of filming from the historical event, with its causes, effects, and implications, or from the speech and gestures with which the actors reinfuse the event with life, or from the participants' meditations on the meaning of the past for the present. The togetherness of all these elements is La Commune. I mean a complete fusion. I'm not just using this as a metaphor or an easy shorthand. As you watch La Commune, it becomes impossible and senseless to distinguish between present and representation. The film becomes a lucid dream: history as reinvented by and for the living.

Review by Chris Fujiwara

Who wouldn't want to watch a 6-hour film about the Paris Commune? Let's see a show of hands... OK, let me put it another way. The Paris Commune was a two-month experiment in direct democracy that took place in 1871 before it was bloodily crushed by a national government intent on restoring a favorable business climate. Among the Commune's reforms: amnesty on unpaid rents, abolition of night work for bakers, expropriation of abandoned factories, establishment of lay education and improvement of education for women.

Peter Watkins, the director of the '60s classics The War Game and Privilege, shot La Commune in 13 days in a disused factory on the outskirts of Paris in 1999. It's a historical film in which events are reenacted with something like verisimilitude, but the actors also step out of their roles to discuss the disaster of globalization and what the Commune means today. And Watkins's 1871 Paris has two TV networks that report on events from viewpoints pro- and anti-Commune.

The film is frenzied, encyclopedic, urgent, euphoric, experimental. In the ribbon-like long-take mise-en-scene, multiple actions and conversations overlap in aimless communicating space-a ceilinged simulacrum of public space, hot light coming down from above and smoke machines on almost constantly. Like other films that use long duration, La Commune asks to be experienced, not just perceived. From a Situationist text: "Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there." This could be a motto for Watkins' s film. He knows the objective reasons for the Commune's failure, but those aren't what he made the film for. He's more interested in the immanent "consummation" in the experience of the Commune. To give Watkins the last word (from a text on his Web site): "What happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia-which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma."

The New York Times

July 3, 2003, Thursday

THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK FILM REVIEW
It's Paris in 1871, and You Are There
By DAVE KEHR

At 67, Peter Watkins remains a restless radical, creating films that spectacularly defy narrative conventions, entrenched ideologies and, it must be said, the patience of his viewers. With a running time of 5 hours 45 minutes, Mr. Watkins's most recent film, ''La Commune (Paris, 1871),'' is far from his longest work, but in many ways it is his most ambitious. (The longest, ''The Journey,'' a 1987 survey of the nuclear arms race, was 12 hours.)

Centered on the story of the Paris Commune, the working-class insurgency that briefly ruled the French capital in 1871, Mr. Watkins's film is at once a provocative account of a neglected episode in social history, a call to arms against the contemporary injustices of capitalism, a critique of the mass media and an experiment in collective filmmaking that recalls the heady days after France's last mass rebellion in May 1968. ''La Commune'' opens today with its New York theatrical premiere at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village.

In these risk-averse times, it is a pleasure to see a film that fails by attempting too much. Frustrating and demanding as it may be, ''La Commune (Paris, 1871)'' is essential viewing for anyone interested in taking an exploratory step outside the Hollywood norms. Mr. Watkins, despite the large body of work he produced later, remains perhaps best known for ''The War Game,'' his pioneering 1965 mock documentary, which used the techniques of television reporting to depict the aftermath of nuclear war in a British city. (Though totally fictional, it won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967).

''La Commune (Paris, 1871)'' extends those documentary techniques, imagining a 19th-century Paris equipped with television (although black-and-white). Most of the film is reported by a pair of eagerly partisan anchors on Commune TV. The opposing viewpoint, that of the bourgeois government that fled to the safe suburban haven of Versailles, is presented by a mustachioed fop who is the host of the news on Versailles TV.

''La Commune'' was shot in 1999 entirely in an abandoned factory in Montreuil, a Paris suburb, dressed to suggest the streets of the working-class 11th Arrondissement and populated by some 220 amateur and professional actors. Mr. Watkins involved his cast in doing their own research on the characters, actual or composite, they would be playing. The performers then had to divide into groups representing the conflicting factions in the drama: members of the National Guard, who deserted the government to support the Commune; the neighborhood politicians, who rose to prominence as the Commune became more centralized and authoritarian; the bourgeoisie (curiously, most represented by angry, umbrella-wielding women), who opposed the Commune; and the oppressed populace of seamstresses, laundresses and artisans, the Commune's most passionate participants.

Bringing these figures into largely improvised conflict, Mr. Watkins creates long, minimally edited sequences in which great issues of social justice and radical reform are debated in luxuriant detail. He also lets his performers step out of character and comment on their own roles, their comfort level in playing the personalities they have adopted and how they see the issues of ''La Commune'' reflected in contemporary French politics.

If the film has a single conceptual weakness, it is Mr. Watkins's inability to distinguish between debate and hysterical assertion, the latter being the most frequent path of improvisational actors eager to call attention to themselves. Too much of the movie is played out in bursts of righteous indignation that seem far more like acting exercises than intellectual exchange.

The history seems, at least to this inexpert viewer, solid enough, and Mr. Watkins does not hide the contradictions of the Commune to create a naïvely utopian vision of the movement. The film may argue the necessity of a sweeping egalitarian revolution, but it also suggests its impossibility. If everyone has an equal say, there are no bosses, and if there are no bosses, there is no organization. The Commune collapses partly because of its own nonhierarchical ideals, which give an angry seamstress as much say in strategy as a professional soldier. ''Everyone debates,'' one character says, ''no one obeys.''

Where ''The Commune'' may have bitten off more that it can comfortably masticate is in its critique of television news. The technique of the two reporters, who stick their microphone in the faces of assorted communards and demand, ''Who are you and what are you doing?,'' is obtrusive and alienating, and it seems to refer to an earlier, more naïve period when television journalism was rooted in the cinéma vérité style of the 1960's -- when Mr. Watkins was a producer for the BBC. Only C-Span would now broadcast the long, uninterrupted discourses that Mr. Watkins presents as a staple of Commune TV. Today's cable news channels would reduce them each to 10-second sound bites surrounded by flashy graphics and framed by running news tickers. Contemporary news channels present a kind of simultaneous reductiveness and overload that squelches reflection and analysis far more thoroughly than the blatant political partisanship of Mr. Watkins's fictional reporters.

Review by Victoria E. Thompson

Arizona State University, for H-France, August 2003.
(http://h-france.net/)

Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris 1871) is a thought-provoking and moving tribute to the desire for a better world. It is unconventional, both in its method of filming and in its approach to history. While this unconventionality makes it a challenge to think about how to make use of this film effectively and practically in the history classroom, it also provides a unique and rewarding glimpse into a process of great interest to historians, that of collective, revolutionary action.

Some viewers will not like this film. In the beginning, I reacted negatively to the length of the film, the emphasis on discussion over action, the anachronistic presence of television reporters, the repetitious discussions, and the references to current issues in debates among participants. These elements have led some to conclude that the film is "not finished" or "amateurish." Yet as I continued to watch the film, I found myself increasingly drawn into the process that Watkins was trying to set in motion.

La Commune (Paris 1871) is five hours and forty-five minutes long in French (available with English subtitles). The film was conceived and directed by Peter Watkins, known for films such as The War Game (1965) and The Freethinker (1992-4). It was filmed in black and white by cinematographer Odd Geir Saether and included a cast of over 220 individuals, 60 percent of whom had no prior acting experience. It is a joint production of 13 Production, La Sept ARTE and the Musée d'Orsay.

The film traces the events of the 1871 Paris Commune in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris. More accurately, it traces reactions of both participants and bystanders to the events of the Paris Commune and gives us a sense of daily life under the Commune. None of the "big" events of the Commune--such as the assassination of Archbishop Darboy or the burning of the Hôtel de Ville--are recreated on camera. However, we do see a glimpse into some of the "small" events: a civil marriage, a classroom previously taught by nuns now taught by lay schoolteachers, a meeting of the Union des Femmes (a group formed during the Commune to advance the cause of women's rights), a group of Communards defending a barricade.

The film intersperses text that recounts the major events of the Commune: scenes of an actor representing Adolph Thiers speaking to the Assembly at Versailles; news reporting on the Commune broadcast by an invented television network "TV Nationale Versailles"; scenes in the apartment of Madame Talbot, whose letters to her daughter relate a bourgeois woman's experience of the Commune, and the actions and opinions of a group of inhabitants of the eleventh arrondissement. The eleventh arrondissement is recreated on a set that retains its artificiality. Indeed, the first scene of the film takes us on a tour of the set where most of the filming will take place. The goal, according to Watkins, was to " 'hover' between reality and theatricality."[1]

Before filming began, the cast was instructed to read up on the Commune and on the individuals who participated. This individual research was in addition to the research carried out by Watkins' team, who looked into the history of the Commune and into daily life in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Watkins' website, they were aided in their work by historians such as Alain Dalotel, Michel Cordillot, Marcel Cerf, Robert Tombs, and Jacques Rougerie. Throughout the film, participants read stories from period newspapers and quote theorists and actual members of the Commune. However, while the film is historically accurate in its recounting of the events and in such details as costume and songs, it can by no means be considered a reconstruction of the Paris Commune. Rather, the film uses the Paris Commune as a means to question both past and present.

Most of the film is devoted to discussion. In the first tape, inhabitants of the eleventh arrondissement articulate their grievances with the government and the Catholic church: poverty, poor housing conditions, a growing gap between rich and poor, and religious control of schooling. In small and large groups, individuals discuss the harsh conditions under which they work and live. As the film progresses, discussion focuses on the events of the Commune, and on the way TV Versailles portrays these events. Commune TV is created to counter inaccurate representations, and its two reporters move throughout the crowds of Communards, eliciting and recording reactions to events. Discussion moves, over the course of the film, from the causes of the rebellion to its internal workings. Participants discuss the best means to create a new society, the principles upon which that society should be based, and the problems that face revolutionary movements that try to walk a line between democracy and order. At one point in tape four, for example, members of the National Guard discuss power sharing. One participant says, "It's something of a contradiction. This hierarchy with people who manipulate and centralize power and give orders that sometimes get us, our friends, and brothers killed on the field because of tactical errors. Who's really calling the tune here? Us, the Committee of Public Safety the Sub-Committees, who?" (Tape 4, 00:02).

According to Watkins' website, the film was largely unscripted. Participants read about the Commune, and then further developed their understanding and opinion of the event in discussion with others while making the film. This gives the film a remarkable sense of immediacy. When participants are debating whether or not business owners should distribute profits to their workers or the validity of establishing a Committee of Public Safety, they are really debating the question rather than reciting a script they have been given. Their spontaneously invented dialogue gives the viewer a sense of what participants might have said; the interpretation of the Commune that emerges as a result is the work of a group rather than one individual author. Due to this process, the emotion and spontaneity that is part of impassioned public debate comes through strongly in this film, and gives the viewer an amazing sense of what it might have been like to be in Paris in the spring of 1871.

By the third tape, discussions based on past events begin transitioning into discussions based on the present. Characters in costume begin reflecting on their own experiences as actors in this film and compare past and present, focusing on the continuities between the two. One participant, for example, remarks, "More than a century later, we've sent people to the moon, etc. But it's exactly the same thing. Homelessness, precariousness, destitution. Growing inequalities . . . ." (Tape 3, 00:48). This sense that the problems faced by the Communards are still problems today is voiced by many of the participants in the film, and is emphasized by the interspersed text, which begins to tie past issues into the present. For example, in the third tape, a discussion on problems facing women in 1871 France among members of the Union des Femmes is interspersed with text that provides statistics on the situation of women in France in 1999. One such statistic notes, for example, that while more women than men obtain university degrees, women dominate in the secretarial field.

While highlighting similarities between past and present, participants also indicate areas of difference. Globalization and the mass media take a big hit in this film, as agents that, respectively, contribute to the gap between rich and poor and that lull individuals into a sense of false comfort. The "sans-papiers" (undocumented immigrants) are identified in the second half of the film as present-day counterparts to the Communards; in both cases the film presents these groups as marginalized and oppressed by forces outside of their control. The role of the media is also a major component of the film. Indeed, in the opening scenes, the viewer is told that this is a film about both the Commune and the role of the mass media. The anachronism of the rival television stations--TV Versailles and Commune TV--is meant to demonstrate both how the media distorts events and how it encourages passivity. So, for example, we see a report on the women of the Commune broadcast by TV Versailles that would have (if it were historically accurate) laid the basis for the myth of the "Pétroleuses." We also see scenes of Communards sitting silently in a café watching television broadcasts. By the end of the film, however, the Communards reject the distortion and passivity of the media. One woman, getting ready to defend the barricade she and others have built, declares, "The biggest pain in the ass is that you're still here recording, watching everything […] You have to join us. Drop your microphone." (Tape 4, 00:53)

Peter Watkins has long been a critic of conventional methods of filmmaking and of the dominance of films produced in Hollywood. On his website, he argues that both the form and process of mass media productions create passivity in viewers and encourage their acceptance of globalization. He writes, "This 'vision' of the way in which our planet 'has to develop' (a keynote for globalization is the idea that it is inevitable) is not only enforced by most governments around the world, it is promulgated daily by global TV and by the cinema of Hollywood (and its European and Asian clones)."[2] It does this, he contends, by presenting both current events and history in a certain way, leaving out alternative viewpoints and outcomes, and employing a fast pace, frequent cuts, and a short time span, to stifle any possibility of critical reflection: "This fragmented, extremely rapid, densely packed and constantly moving narrative structure is the antithesis of any reflective, questioning, complex, participatory process possible within TV and the cinema."[3]

In La Commune (Paris 1871), Watkins sought to produce a film based on alternative forms and processes, one that would encourage critical reflection in the viewer and participation by the actors in the process of telling the story. He has succeeded on both counts. The length of the film, the time given to discussion of issues--both past and present--and the insight the film provides into the process of social change invites reflection both on the state of the world today and on the process of historical change on the part of the viewer. One cannot help, for example, reflecting upon the difficulties faced by revolutionaries as they strive to create something new, and yet are inevitably limited by their need to make use of existing institutions and practices. The participants in the film were also clearly drawn to reflect upon the historical moment they were recreating. "What impressed me," one of the actors says, "is that the Commune opens up many paths and reflections on its failures" (Tape 3, 01:27). Indeed, the participants become increasingly articulate on the challenges inherent in the process of revolutionary change, debating the wisdom of moves such as establishing a Committee of Public Safety, or maintaining certain pre-existing taxes. The most poignant moment of reflection comes near the end of the film, during the final "Bloody Week" of the Commune when the participants are getting ready to meet the forces of Versailles on the barricades. The reporters of Commune TV move through the crowd, asking participants if they would take to the barricades today. The responses reveal a sense of frustration and a desire for change that must have prompted the real Communards to risk their lives, while at the same time giving us a sense of their courage and their fear. At the end, when the participants are lined up against the wall, awaiting execution, we see on their faces expressions of anger, horror, fear and sorrow. We have spent long hours watching them try, and fail, to bring about revolutionary change and, like them, we have been changed in the process.

La Commune is a film worth seeing, and a film worth showing to students. While the anachronistic presence of TV reporters in 1871 risks confusing some students, the film's ability to depict the process of revolution makes it a valuable teaching tool. The film could be of use in a course on the Commune, on comparative revolutions, or on modern France. It raises interesting questions on the use and representation of history, and could be profitably compared to a historical monograph on the Commune or to a primary source recounting the events. But how to use it? At five hours and forty-five minutes, several weeks of the semester, or two long evenings outside of class would need to be devoted simply to viewing the film. One of the drawbacks, from a pedagogical point, of view is that showing a short segment of the film would not be worthwhile, because this would not allow students to experience fully the process of change the film captures. While the logistics of figuring out how to show the film in its entirety present a challenge, many instructors would no doubt find the effort worthwhile.

NOTES
[1] Watkins, Peter. "Production Background, La Commune de Paris." http://www.peterwatkins.lt/varyk.htm (6 June 2003).
[2] Watkins, Peter. "The global crisis, the MAVM, and media education
Summary of the web-site"
http://www.peterwatkins.lt/varyk.htm (6 June 2003).
[3] Ibid. Victoria E. Thompson Arizona State University
victoria.thompson@asu.edu

VARIETY

By EDDIE COCKRELL

White-knuckle thriller, history lesson, polemical mass-media critique, genre-bending docudrama: British provocateur Peter Watkins' "La Commune (Paris 1871)," the 12th film in a thematically consistent career that's endured nearly four decades of controversy, stages the violent Parisian anarchist uprising of 1871 as a televised media event on interlocking and labyrinthine sets on a makeshift warehouse soundstage. Taped in stark black-and-white and clocking in 15 minutes shy of six hours, invigorating pic is big, passionate and brimming with compelling human details and broad sociopolitical idealism. Extreme length aside, "La Commune" is an involving, important work that reps a high-profile event for fests and distribs, as well as a prestige buy for cablers the world over.

During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, radical Republicans and socialists in Paris revolted against the Versailles-based elected National Assembly, which they viewed as composed of unrepentant monarchists who caved in to the demands of Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck.

In mid-March of 1871, the Parisians -- themselves splintered into numerous political camps -- formed a proletarian dictatorship that segued into the Communards via an elected municipal council dubbed the Central Committee of the National Guard. This worker-friendly provisional government passed numerous new laws favoring individual rights, but before they could be enacted, troops were sent from Versailles to crush the uprising. The resulting slaughter of anarchists and innocent citizens alike, which lasted from March 21-28, claimed about 25,000 lives and has become known as Bloody Week.

Pic immediately breaks the fourth wall with establishing p.o.v. shot of nearly empty soundstage, on which the white-haired director can be glimpsed peering intently into a video monitor with his crew. Hung loosely around the intrepid man-on-the-street interviews of a tense pair of Commune TV correspondents, narrative follows the intricate political machinations of the populace and the military, who speak directly to the camera throughout.

A procession of plain-talking citizens states beefs and allegiances, punctuated by intertitles providing details on developments. Workers bicker with their shopkeeper boss, while a talking head on state TV warns of danger from Algerian immigrants.

Soon a somber reporter from National TV Versailles is breaking into unseen local programming to broadcast "official" versions of events, outright lies that inflame residents further and set the stage for violent revolt. National Assembly leader Adolphe Thiers (nicknamed "little runt" by Parisians) takes to the airwaves to deliver stiff, inflammatory rhetoric. As the election results are announced, citizens come together to lustily bellow choruses of "La Marseillaise" and celebrate their unity.

Euphoria gives way to apprehension as internecine bickering among the newly elected officials -- and their decisions to hold closed-door meetings -- erodes the public's confidence. The separation of church and state is debated, as are the pros and cons of women in the military. As part one ends, civil war seems unavoidable.

As part two gets under way, efforts to calm the populace are being neutralized by the new red tape of myriad rules and regulations conceived to provide order. Representatives of a newly formed woman's group are almost comically frustrated in their efforts to get meeting space in an official building An extended debate on women's rights segues to a male-only pub bull session. Over time, thesps begin breaking character to discuss their reactions to the film thus far, and, if this is pic's most challenging passage, it's also a riveting way for Watkins to employ his careerlong strategy of tying the past to the present.

In pic's final two hours, the journalists quarrel with each other over the veracity of their reports and a palpable sense of foreboding descends over all. In agonizing detail, Watkins charts the fractious events leading up to Bloody Week and the massacre itself, in vivid yet determinedly non-sensationalistic fashion.

Helmer is no stranger to the heady mix of media and reality: His 1964 debut "Culloden" employs much the same kind of structure in its re-creation of the last battle fought on British soil, and he won 1965's docu Oscar for controversial nuclear holocaust-themed "The War Game." The 200-plus non-professionals in the cast perform with fierce veracity, and in true communal spirit are listed alphabetically under some three dozen class groupings ("The 66th Battalion," "The Children," "The Talbot Family").

Tech credits are tops, with nimble hand-held Betacams of Odd Geir Saither and crew seemingly everywhere at once. No effort is made to mask bare walls of the warehouse, giving events a surreal otherworldliness that somehow heightens the tension. Pic is officially divided into two parts of 164 and 181 minutes, but was shown at Toronto fest on five videocassettes, with a single 15-minute break at the 3:36 mark. In any configuration, "La Commune" is powerful, heady stuff.