In the Intense Now is a movie directed by the Brazilian filmmaker, Joao Moreira Salles. The picture was released in 2017 and was screened at the Walker Art Center as part of a series of movies about "the legacy of 1968" -- these are Leftist documentaries about the student rebellions and failed uprisings in that year. In the Intense Now is extremely moving, a film that transcends the merely political. Although the ostensible subject of the picture is the French student rebellion in May 1968 and the repression of similar demonstrations by Soviet armor in the Czech Republic in that same year, Salles' theme is bigger and more universal -- ultimately, his film is a melancholy and profound meditation on the transience of human happiness. What makes us happy? What is the nature of joy? And why are the conditions that lead to human happiness so damnably ephemeral?
Salles intercuts four types of footage. First, there are home-made 8 mm movies shot by Salles' mother during a month-long trip to China in 1966 -- although she is in China at the height of the immensely murderous Cultural Revolution, a cadre of Red Guards keeps the Brazilians from any sign of the carnage underway and Salles' mother perceives China as a kind of beautiful Utopia. People in Czechoslovakia, at a wedding feast, toast one another and seem deliriously happy -- but Soviet tanks are on the way to crush pro-Democracy forces in that country. In May, the Student Uprising occurs in Paris, led by the media star, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Cohn-Bendit has no program for the uprising that he finds himself leading, flees to Berlin on funds paid to him by Paris Match, a photo-magazine and, after some tumult, things return to normal in France. Salles' family goes on vacation and spends the summer of 1968 in Brazil.
The first half of the 127 minute movie shows crude but poignant footage in China, Salles' metaphor for perfect social justice and the liberation of human happiness -- of course, he understands that Mao's paradise is, in fact, an inferno, but this fact doesn't intrude on the film. Salles expects us to know enough about Mao's "Cultural Revolution" to grasp that it is all a fraud. He interposes two shots: a young woman running back away from a wall of tear gas in Paris, her face transfigured by a radiant smile, and another woman running toward the camera in China, also radiant with joy. Salles' thesis is that his mother was intensely happy in China -- we see the slender smiling woman riding on a handsome man's shoulders and sitting atop strange sculpted animals standing incongruously in field of growing corn and sorghum. Cohn-Bendit, in Paris, is asked what he expects to accomplish by his student revolt -- he looks like Alfred E. Neuman in the old Mad magazines grinning maniacally and (accurately) notes that, in all of Marx's writings, there are only about three paragraphs on the subject of what society will look like after the Revolution. He has no program, no plan for a better world -- instead, he sees the process of revolt as itself a source of joy and happiness; he wants human beings to be liberated to experience pleasure and happiness each in his or her own way. But he is coopted by Match and becomes irrelevant. DeGaulle gives a speech denouncing the rebellion and is ignored because he looks like an old and feeble man on the TV. But, then, he speaks on the radio and people recall his broadcasts from World War Two when he seemed to have saved the Nation. There's a huge march on the Champs Elyse that dwarfs the student protests -- 550,000 people marching for normalcy. And, then, the summer holidays intervene and people seek pleasures that are not political -- the sun and travel and beaches. The revolution is over. Salles bookends the movie with shots of a radiant young woman, presumably his mother, with Mont St. Michael behind her, boxy yellow Citroens on the highway -- an image of normal, non-politicized human happiness, striking because it so mundane.
The second half of the film is more sorrowful, an elegy for the failed revolutions at the Sorbonne and Prague. Salles intercuts spooky looking clandestinely filmed footage of tanks in Prague with images of ex-revolutionaries, now 23 years old, planning on writing their memoirs -- in effect, their lives are over; their greatest joy was an abortive revolution in the streets of Paris when they were 20. (This part of the film reminds me of Wordsworth's transcendent account of the French Revolution in his novelistic poem, -- "bliss was it to be alive"; but because of the political moment or the sheer joy of being young?) We see two jawdropping music videos -- one made about the time of the Russian intervention in Prague shows a young woman prepared for martyrdom in the guise of Joan of Arc; the next video taken a year later features endearing baby animals illustrating a song that is densely coded for fear of censorship. For better or worse, babies, including animal babies, make people happy -- this is a mode of human happiness that is completely apolitical. Funerals take over the last section of the film: we see the funeral of Jan Palach who burned himself to death in Prague and funerals in Brazil and Paris. Most of the revolutionaries commit suicide before they are 30. Salles discovers that human happiness can't be scripted, that it arises from the "unlooked for encounter" as his mother has written in her journal "that yields ineluctable emotion." Salles notes that he has no images of his mother after the eighties -- we don't know what has happened to her, but her happiness seems to have vanished. In a bold final sequence, Salles shows the young Mao writing a poem about the transience of human pleasures. The sequence shows Mao has he ages and becomes fat and old and, then, obviously weak, frail, possibly senescent. The narrator (presumably Salles) reminds us of the great slogans of the student rebellion: Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible and Under the Paving Stones, the Beach -- and he tells us that the latter slogan was, in fact, contrived by two advertising agents and didn't arise organically from the revolt at all. Two sequences don't derive from the sixties -- one of them taken 2017 shows the Paris subway station, Gaiete ("Joy") where one of the sixties radicals killed himself by diving under a train. The other sequence, which ends the film, was made at the very dawn of cinema -- it is one of the Lumiere brothers films showing factory workers emerging from their work-place around 1898. Preserved forever in the film is a instance of simple, radiant, and pure human happiness -- the joy of being liberated from work for the evening. Earlier we have seen a mournful DeGaulle telling us that the workplace makes people sad and that this is the curse of the modern age. With this heartbreaking and beautiful film, Salles joins Chris Marker as one of the greatest of all film essayists . Indeed, I dare say that in this movie, Salles excels beyond much of what Marker's more cerebral cinema achieved. You can't watch this film without shedding tears.
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