Series Site
"Fifty years ago, in the merry month of May, Charles de Gaulle’s French Fifth Republic was teetering on the edge of out-and-out upheaval, as workers went on strike and students took to the streets, erecting paving stone barricades as though it were 1789 all over again. The aim was nothing less than a new world; the result was, in the final analysis, mostly more of the same—though an entire generation would be marked for life by the moment’s sense of boundless potential, as well as the crippling comedown that followed. Movies were the medium of the ’68 generation, and so its impression is felt acutely both in films made in the heat of the moment, as well as those revisiting it from the distance of years. In tribute to this important anniversary is a selection of works, many not screened in the US since a 2003 program, and newly translated for this series, delivering to the tumultuous present something of the dizzying possibility and devastating destitution of that long-ago-and-still-present half-made revolution."—Metrograph