Brett Morgen's highly praised documentary Chicago 10, about the fallout of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago forty years ago opens in limited release this weekend. Morgen has claimed since it first debuted last year at Sundance that the film isn't really about 1968, but about 2008, and indeed, it seems to have fresh, albeit grim, resonance today, with the recent death of arch-conservative William F. Buckley, who had a memorable confrontation on the air while covering the convention. Steven Spielberg is himself crafting a fictionalized version of the same events for The Trial of the Chicago 7, and America gears up for one of the most electrifying presidential races in recent memory as an unpopular war rages overseas and tumult grips some of our closest allies. But as relevant as it might seem from a moviemaking perspective, in other ways, 1968 couldn't be further away; the revolutionary consciousness of that bloody year and the infinite possibilites that came with the Paris revolts seem like they happened on another planet. Still, in many ways, it was a magical year that casts a very long shadow over the lives of a number of people, many of whom are filmmakers. Here's a look at some of the better films about or influenced by that impossible year.
MEDIUM COOL (1969)
In many ways, the definitive film about the events of 1968, at least from an American perspective, will always be Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. The first nondocumentary feature film directed by the legendary cinematographer was meant to be a highly fictionalized treatment of chaos and mayhem breaking out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; but it quickly transmogrified into something altogether stranger, blurring the line between truth and fiction, as reality quickly began to outstrip Wexler's fictionalized vision. Eventually, while filming, he found himself caught up in the (unstaged) action of the riots and police brutality that wracked the city and altered the political landscape of America, and one of his crew uttered the immortal warning: "Look out, Haskell! It's real!" (This later became the title of a very worthwhile 2001 documentary about the movie.)
PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)
Though it was neither filmed in nor set in 1968, one of the most famous — or infamous — of Peter Watkins' inventive pseudo-documentaries is completely suffused with the spirit of the times. The director himself has admitted to being highly galvanized by the events of that year, both in the United States and in Europe, and some of the nonprofessional actors he recruited to play roles in the film were participants in the Chicago riots. The film itself concerns a grueling trek through the desert by a handful of dissidents, escorted by a grim-faced group of soldiers in some sort of vicious game. It quickly degenerates into a terrifying realistic showdown between the forces of law and order and the voices of revolution and dissent; its creepy verisimilitude serves to remind us that maybe those days aren't as long past as we'd like to think.
IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI (1978)
Guy Debord, provocateur, poet, philosopher and filmmaker, was one of the key members of the Situationist International, and as such, one of the hidden architects of the bizarre, almost miraculous events of Paris, May 1968. Made in the decade following those events, this experimental film (the title means "In the night, we turn and are consumed by the fire") puts to work his theories of detournement — of taking cultural images and repackaging them with subversive intent — in service of both celebrating and eulogizing the near-revolution. Intriguing, frustrating, brilliant and flawed, much like the man himself, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a movie worth seeking out. If nothing else, you have to love the audacity of a film that features a hand-typed note from God, claiming that if he'd known that it would eventually have produced a film so offensive, he would never have created the world.
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988)
Paris and Chicago weren't the only places deeply embroiled in chaotic upheaval in the year 1968. All over the world, from Italy to Japan, protest movements, government misconduct, and a seemingly unstoppable youth movement put nations in turmoil. One of the biggest hotspots was Czechoslovakia, where Milan Kundera sets his famously erotic, tragic and beautiful novel. It sets a promiscuous young doctor at odds with his own desires and emotions on the eve of the Soviet invasion, which is used as both political and personal backdrop against a timeless human story. Ably directed by Philip Kaufman and beautifully acted by Juliet Binoche, Lena Olin, and in one of his first major roles, Daniel Day-Lewis, The Unbearable Lightness of Being perfectly captures the tone of the days, twenty years later on.
REGULAR LOVERS (2005)
A number of European filmmakers have attempted to capture the Spirit of '68, both in documentaries and in narrative film. It's a difficult task, if for no other reason than that the causes of the revolt, as well as its ultimate collapse, are still poorly understood and subject to the endless predatory claims of those who say it belongs, ideologically, to them. This little-seen film by French director Phillippe Garrel perhaps comes closest, simply by being so messy, ambling and chaotic; by not attempting to frame an overweening narrative structure over those dreamlike days in Paris, Garrel gives us a rather astonishing evocation of them in all their rambling, inchoate, erotic glory. He quietly succeeds where Bernardo Bertolucci's earlier, and similar, film The Dreamers noisily failed.