Counter, Revolution, Film ~ Ghalya Saadawi's seminar from Confluence to Confluence
April 2024: confluence 4 in Essaouira
Between Historical Materialism, Social Totality and Revolution
readings:
Karl Marx. Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (2 pages) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
Karl Marx. Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. Translated by Jack Cohen. Introduction by E. J. Hobsbawm. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Introduction.
Raya Dunayevskaya. Philosophy and Revolution from Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Chapter 2, pp. 47-60.
Martin Jay. Marxism and Totality. The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkley: University of California, 1984. Introduction and Chapter 2 (read what you can).
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester: Zero Books, 2015. Introduction and Part II.
March 2024: confluence 3 at PAF
This seminar will consider the Palestinian revolution in the 60s and 70s via Jean Luc Godard's and Anne Marie Mieville's Içi et Ailleurs (1976). As part of the Dziga Vertov Group's methodological injunction to make political films, politically, Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Mieville film this footage of Palestinian fidayeen in 1969-1970, only to make and edit Içi et Ailleurs in the context of Paris several years later, once many of those fighters had been killed in Black September, and the battle for Palestine still raged in a different form. Bringing in the class contradictions and struggles of France itself at the time into the edit, as well as the central social role played by images, the film encodes how cinema contends with political struggle, how cinematic images are constructed, what absent images inform the ones we do see, and what militant political cinema, at a distance, may look like.
readings:
Irmgard Emmelhainz. “Before Our Eyes: Les Mots, Non Les Choses.” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2009. Selections.
Irmgard Emmelhainz. Jean-Luc Godard’s Filmmaking. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2019. Introduction and selections.
D. N Rodowick. The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and. Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Berkley: University of California Press, 1988, 1994. Introduction and selections.
Rula Shawan, “Içi et Ailleurs: The Backstory.” Senses of Cinema: Forms that Think Jean-Luc Godard, Issue 100, January, 2022. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2022/forms-that-think-jean-luc-godard/ici-et-ailleurs-the-backstory/
additional readings:
Fardi A. Bardawil. Revolution and Disenchantment. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. Chapter 3 + 4
Ghassan Kanafani, “The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine.” New York: Committee for a Democratic Palestine, 1972. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kanafani/1972/revolt.htm
“The Popular Front and External Operations.” 1971
January 2024: confluence 2 at NAC, Nida
“That peaceful violence that the world is steeped In”
We will read Fanon’s exploration of the dialectical relation between the colonised and the coloniser; the struggle through violence of freedom, the rola and psychic state of the national bourgeois ruling classes and national rulers between metropole and colony; and the politics of neutralism, among others. We consider arguments of legal rupture made by Jacques Verges in the Schroeder documentary on the Algerian liberation struggle. We will consider the Pontecorvo film, La Bataille D’Algers through Fanon, and formally through its documentary. We read Toscano’s commentary on the legacy of French intellectual history inflected through its responses to and engagements with the Algerian war of independence and the so-called subject of decolonization.
Readings:
Fanon, Frantz. “On Violence.” In The Wretched of the Earth, 28-84. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 1963.
Additional readings:
Byrd, Dustin J and Seyed Javad Miri. Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Social Theory: A View from the Wretched. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020.
Byrne, J. J. Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Le Sueur, James D. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Toscano, Alberto. “The Name of Algeria: French Philosophy and the Subject of Decolonization.” Viewpoint Magazine February 1, 2018. https://viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/name-algeria-french-philosophy-subject-decolonization/.
Films:
Gilles Pontecorvo (dir.), La Bataille d’Algers (1966).
Barbet Schroeder (dir.), The Devil's Advocate (2007). Parts, esp first half.
November 2023: introduction days at PAF, St. Erme:
DAI-BULLETIN 2023—2024 nr. 1 November 2023
