The absent revolution. Ghosts and echoes from May 68 in Jean-Luc Godard and Dziga Vertov´s cinema

Abstract

How long lasted May 68? A whole month or just a week? Historians do not quite agree on the duration of French May, but neither on its effects, nor even on the real reach of the protest movements and revolutionaries that shook Europe and the US. in the late 60's and early 70's. Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, like many of his contemporaries could not, nor wanted, to remain outside the process and together with the group Dziga Vertov would be launched to the realization of a series of unorthodox documentary films that suppose an extraordinary counter-narration of the events that occurred in those important months of the late 60's. The director and his collaborators shied away from a direct and explanatory documentary image, and with prophetic lucidity, preferred to investigate the absent image, always elusive, hidden, through explorations that would have as spearhead complex technical explorations of sound and image montage. The 68 leaves a trail in the documentaries of Godard but also in several of his later productions. It seems that the Franco-Swiss director could no longer escape the image of the revolution, or its ontological and communicative value