EYE Film Museum is reviving the revolutionary year 1968. But didn't the wave of innovation start much earlier?

1968 was not just the year of flying Paris paving stones. It was also the year of violent race riots in America, of Russian tanks in Prague, of activist filmmakers and Czech surrealism. Those poignant images, plus the unsurpassed rock of the time, performed by The Silverfaces, passed by on the promising opening night of 1968: You Say You Want a Revolution. A wonderful and large-scale programme of films and talk shows with which EYE Film Museum celebrates the 50th anniversary of that magical year for a month. The year that has been touched on here before. See the Godard biopic Le Redoutable and the documentary It has been seen On Reve, freedom and art.

From 26 April to 25 May, '68 blows through EYE with a wide and diverse set of screenings. From critically activist documentaries to Truffaut's love story Baisers volés and Romero's groundbreaking zombie film Night of the Living Dead. Films from and about 1968. Supplemented by debates on burning issues. To what extent was there a revolution? What was it about and what sticks? And in Trump times, what can we learn from the cinema of protest, activism and the struggle for equal rights?

Anger and euphoria

Yes, it was a heady year, and not just in Paris. That was underlined on the opening night. Filip Bloem touched on the struggle with Czech censorship. Tracy Metz, who grew up in America, recalled how feelings of anger and euphoria went hand in hand. The hope that everything would now be different. This alongside the embarrassment brought on by the (almost live) television images of the Vietnam War. Roel Jansen, author of the book 1968: You Say You Want a Revolution, told another little-known story. How, in Mexico City, protests against the Olympics to be held there were bloodily suppressed.

In a press release, EYE states that it wants to explore the spirit of 1968 and the international batch of transverse filmmakers who rose then. Indeed, when you see that illustrious collection of titles, you would think that 1968 was the year it all began. Understandably, 1968 has gone down in history as a key moment, a symbol of that era. But wasn't it actually the case that that whole decade was unsettled? That the moment the paving stones flew through the air in Paris was a climax rather than a starting point? That cinematic newcomers had also been stirring for quite some time?

Nouvelle vague

France had been the scene of political unrest for some time. In America, protests against the Vietnam War came to a head around 1965. Looking at the film world, in America the power of the big studios slowly crumbled in the 1950s and 1960s. Elsewhere, the most influential break with traditional cinema - the 'cinéma de papa' - was the famous 'nouvelle vague' in France.

It was a movement of film critics who had decided to direct themselves and choose a personal way of making films. Get rid of all the rules! Films like Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (1959) and Renais' Hiroshima mon amour (1959) immediately proved the vitality of that movement. Jean-Luc Godard, the iconoclastic filmmaker who would transform himself into a 'militant Maoist', made his debut with his highly influential A bout de souffle (1960). Many films from those years were instant classics that have lost none of their vitality.

It was also the time when documentary filmmakers found new freedom thanks to lightweight 16mm cameras. In America, 'direct cinema' emerged in the 1960s. Filmmakers wanted to capture events as directly as possible without interviews or commentary. Frederick Wiseman showed American institutions as we had never seen them before: Titicut Follies (1967), the one to be screened at EYE High School (1968) and Law and Order (1969). D.A. Pennebaker turned his camera on the election (Primary, 1960) and Bob Dylan (Don't Look Back, 1967). Feature filmmakers also often drew inspiration from this rediscovered realism.

Entirely in the spirit of the time, John Cassavetes had made his beat film in 1959 Shadows already turned as a jazz improvisation. His wedding drama included in the EYE programme Faces (1968) is in everything the opposite of a slick Hollywood production.

Prague Spring

More or less simultaneously with the French movement, a 'nouvelle vague' also saw the light of day in Czechoslovakia. Milos Forman, the later director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, would become the best-known name. Others, including Vera Chytilova and Jan Svankmajer blew an absurdist-surrealist wind. Typical of many of those Czech freebooters. All this well before the short-lived political freedom of the Prague Spring (January-August 1968). EYE has also set aside a theme night for this.

This is far from exhausting the examples. As early as 1962, angry German filmmakers had declared 'Papa's Kino' dead at the leading short film festival in Oberhausen. In the Netherlands in 1966, Louis van Gasteren shot his short film banned for public screening Because my bike was there. From 1965 to 1967, the Provo movement challenged regentism with playful actions. Johan van der Keuken was another filmmaker who found inspiration in those years with his poetic and later political documentaries.

Disney

That this urge for innovation in cinema had been going on for some time is also apparent when I enter 1960 on Google. Then film titles like Antonioni's L'Avventura, Hitchcock's Psycho, the new British realism of Karel Reisz with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Visconti's Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli and, of course, Godard's A Bout de souffle.

Seen this way, the 1968 films shown by EYE represent an imaginative sample from a movement that had been running for some time. This fresh wind was also influential outside the political and artistic avant garde. This can be seen, for instance, in the programme's Jungle Book. The swinging animation with which Disney set a new standard for the genre.

Among the work unearthed by EYE from the archives we find a number of rarely shown titles, such as Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One by William Greaves. An ingenious film about a couple with relationship problems, in which the director's role is also up for debate. Whether Wajda's Everything for Sale as an example of independent Polish cinema of the time. In addition, better-known classics, including Lindsay Anderson's anarchic If..., about a violent uprising at a British boarding school and Polanski's iconic horror film Rosemary's Baby. Titles that I remember as films that we loved to show in the Alkmaar film house founded in 1972 that I helped found.

2001

Theme nights with film and discussions are devoted to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam protest, Cuba and Che Guevara and the Prague Spring, among others. Also on the programme are later films recalling 1968. Selma (2014, about Martin Luther King), for example, and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In In the Intense Now through very personal images, Joao Moreira Salles looks back at the euphoria surrounding Mao's great leap forward, and its later dramatic consequences.

Very nice also that Kubrick's impressive space film 2001: A Space Odyssey is included in the programme. At first glance, an oddity. But a pioneering feat in 1968 that combined cinematic and stylistic feats with a critical view of technology.

Ronald Simons, who co-programmed the event with Anna Abrahams, tipped 8 May as a special evening around Earthrise. This first colour image of the earth from space fuelled ecological awareness. The introduction by Vanina Saracino and performance by artist Bjørn Melhus will be followed by the screening of Planet of the Apes. Apes rule the human-ravaged earth.

The closing film is Targets by Peter Bogdanovich, about a Vietnam veteran who commits carnage in a drive-in cinema. This reference to America's obsession with movie stars and guns is screened in a fitting ambiance. As an open-air screening at the Tolhuistuin.