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.
