Horror of '68: Youth and Revolution, by Udith Dematagoda

Udith Dematagoda on Philippe Garrel's 'Les Amants Réguliers,' and revolutionary failure and its aesthetic representation

Les Amants Réguliers (2005, dir. Phillipe Garrel) 

At the end of 2012 I moved to Nice in the South of France to work as a lecteur d’anglais, and somehow ended up staying for two years. The mild winters on the Côte d'Azur were a disorientating experience for someone used to the unrelenting bleakness of the Scottish variety – but somehow I found them a great deal more depressing. My memories of that initial period are interwoven with the films I watched whilst shut up in my room, and two by Phillipe Garrel most readily come to mind. Both starring his son Louis, and filmed in exquisite monochrome, they were the director’s final collaborations with William Lubtchansky (one of French Film’s finest cinematographers) before the latter died in 2010. The first of these was La Frontiere de l’aube (2008) co-starring Laura Smet, the daughter of Jonny Halliday; a sensual, melancholy and languorous piece of cinema - the appeal at the time is obvious in retrospect. The second was Les Amants Reguliéres (Ordinary Lovers, 2005), which despite clocking in at around three hours, I somehow watched numerous times over the course of that first winter. It is this second film that I’ve had cause to recall recently, though I’ve neither had the time or the inclination to actually re-watch it. I will attempt instead to recount it from memory, and as a result, my recollections may assume some degree of embellishment and projection. 

View from my apartment on the Avenue Notre Dame, Nice, 2013

Not without its faults, Les Amants Réguliers is to my mind one of Garrel’s best films - which ordinarily veer towards the self-indulgent. On the surface at least, this one appears to be no exception: a clearly autobiographical rumination on the events of May ’68 and its aftermath, which Garrel experienced first-hand as a young man. A more somber and less garish treatment of the subject than Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (which also starred Louis Garrel), Les Amants Réguliers conveys a subtle disquiet concerning the perennial antagonisms inherent to youthful idealism, and the horror of its inevitable disenchantment. 

Louis Garrel plays a morose 20-year-old poet named François; a role that he seemingly reprises frequently, but for which he is well suited. Somewhere in the beginning he meets Lilie (Clothilde Hesme) a working class sculptor who works in a foundry to support herself. I remember finding the scene of their brief courtship at a party to be very touching. What struck me at the time (on the cusp of unhappily turning 27) was a sense of the ephemeral ease of such youthful encounters, which only require proximity in order to thrive. At the party, fragments of naive and aimless conversation on many topics abound; François wonders if by publishing his poetry he will be betraying the sacred inspiration behind it; asinine views on art are expounded by most of the people there; all of them appear contemptuous of authority and in favor of revolution (its exact character unimportant). Into this carefree existence comes the events of ‘May 68.

Near the beginning (I believe) the Gendarmes accost François in his bedsit and order him to comply with a summons to serve his compulsory military service. Refusing their demand, he puts himself in danger of arrest if the police officers return. François detests the repressive authority of the police within this miniature drama of ideological recognition – a scenario which Louis Althusser painted so vividly in his 1970 essay on the mechanisms of interpellation that were seemingly inspired by the atmosphere of May ’68. Yet François has no appetite for violence. Witnessing the various violent conflagrations occurring around him, whilst walking home one night a Molotov cocktail rolls to his feet just as he finds himself standing next to a van containing a number of police officers. Someone shouts for him to throw it at the policemen, who would easily be burned alive. But he is incapable of doing so: he is a pacifist. In another scenario, as the Police give him chase, he enters an apartment building and begs an anonymous resident to hide him. The weary voice behind the door asks if he is one of those people burning cars on the streets. For some reason, he answers meekly that he is. The door remains closed. He spends a cold sleepless night evading capture on the rooftops. 

An extended and highly impressionistic scene of the riots; dim flashes of light, scratchy fragments of piano and hissing sounds, strange camera angles and perspectives which allow for an intensely surreal experience; figures move in an out of the darkness; the black leather overcoats of the Gendarmes glimmer amidst the smoke; an older man stands with his arms in the air confronting a rapidly advancing line of riot police with raised batons: ‘Je suis pacifiste, Je suis pacifiste’, he cries. The smoke briefly clears; François, Lilie and their friends walk across the street inexplicably dressed as sans-culottes from Revolutionary France, a steely determination in their eyes as they march in silence towards their historic victory. A hallucinatory moment of clarity; a glimpse of what could have been. No such victory comes for the hip young soixante-huitards: their defeat is swift and disorientating. When their revolution fizzles out, François and his bohemian friends take to partying more and smoking opium at the house of a rich friend.

The ‘revolution’ of ‘68 lasted a mere a month and was swiftly forgotten. Its aesthetic representation, however, will persist indefinitely - crystallizing its retrospective horror. Indeed, this is essentially what Garrel’s film captures – nothing remains in this film that relates specifically to the student movement’s political demands, its intentions, or its material vision for reimagining society. Instead, what Garrel captures is purely affective, purely aesthetic. I remember one scene which makes this all too obvious. It takes place at another party, and I can’t seem to recall whether it occurs at the beginning or towards the end - that is to say, whether it’s a scene of carefree exuberance or one of solace and consolation. Perhaps it’s both. In either case, the significance remains unchanged. The song which plays is This Time Tomorrow by The Kinks (a musical leitmotiv that would be taken up by the prolific cinematic plagiarist Wes Anderson in Darjeeling Limited two years later). 

Most of those at the party get up to dance; young good-looking men and women, well-dressed in the chic bohemian fashions of the period; arms flailing wildly, shimmying, laughing, smiling, twisting and gyrating. But François lies almost motionless, sulking on the couch – seemingly lost in the conceited intensity of his thoughts, while the vital (and fleeting) pleasures of youth literally dance across his eyes. It will be a scene of intense identification for many young men who are similarly inclined. Youth is drawn to youth – but it also often holds itself apart, incapable of surmounting the feeling of something to prove to oneself, or a desire for wisdom that disregards that such insights come only through the sacrifice of youth itself - if it ever does. Youth can only be judged in retrospect, as it invariably recedes further into the distance as a vague memory of an endless willing without object. Perhaps the object is youth itself. 

Clothilde Hesme and Louis Garrel in Les Amants Réguliers

In a similar vein, the love story between François and Lilie is a youthful pairing of proximity and vague commonality doomed to failure from the outset.  François approaches the world with the intensity of the aesthete; the injustices and inequities of society him are primarily offensive to his artistic conception of the world. This subtle point, no doubt an autobiographical one, is the one I will attempt to consider and develop. We need not go back to the rites of the ancient world to understand that the notion of revolt against a political order deemed to be oppressive is rooted first in a distaste for the aesthetic cultural conventions of that status quo. Such distaste was inspired in the roman(tic) era by literature, which served the initiatory function once provided by other forms of rite. If, on the one hand, Goethe inadvertently caused the pistol smoke to rise up from countless German villages and unleashed a certain suicidal urge within men of a certain disposition; other works instilled more dynamic effects. A poet such as Byron was at odds with the staid aesthetic conventions of his time, and through rebellion against them – dragged the pageant of his bleeding heart across Europe, in a seemingly aimless pursuit of some spiritual revolt, to his untimely demise on the Ætolian shore. Reading his work served an initiatory function for many young men across Europe. Kondraty Ryleyev, poet and leader of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, knew well that their attempt to overthrow the Tsar and end Serfdom would end in failure, and that they would certainly be executed. But he correctly judged the incalculable symbolic and aesthetic value of such martyrdom to those that would come in their wake. He held a book of Byron’s poetry as he ascended the gallows. That poets are interested only in revolution if it is poetic appears to be a truism, but one which I suspect is too easily forgotten, and more widely applicable than we acknowledge. Perhaps every successful revolt began first as a revolution of the spirit – that is to say an aesthetic revolution – before declining and petering out when the initial spark vanishes - when the lackeys, bureaucrats, and administrators take over. Almost a century later, the revolution inspired by Ryleyev’s example was aided in its task by some of the finest artists, poets and writers Russia ever witnessed. One of them, Vladimir Mayakovsky, later decided to end his own life rather than endure the philistine aesthetic mediocrity of what came in its wake.  

In contrast to François, Lilie is more grounded in her resentment, more pragmatic, less poetic, and more calculating. In one telling scene they lie in bed together in the vast apartment of their rich friend, which has now become both opium den and squat. Lilie tells of how attracted she is to a man they met earlier that day, who is also staying in the apartment. She would like to sleep with him and asks François for permission. François agrees and she goes off – returning sometime later to sleep. The guy’s dick was small, she jokes with him - as they share what some may regard as a special form of intimacy. A subtle awkwardness can be discerned in François’s laughter, however. The scene can be read in many ways, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that François would have much preferred her not to have gone at all. 

François’s opium use spirals as the poetry of that stillborn revolution begins to diminish, and the gaping chasm of disenchantment reveals its endless depths. Lilie leaves him to go to America, to Brooklyn of all places, and writes a haughty letter telling him that she has become an ‘anarchist.’ In my recollection, François dies of an overdose at the film’s denouement, mourning the loss of his love for Lilie. It’s possible that I’m misremembering but this is unimportant. Perhaps far into the future Lilie pursues aims more suited to her ambitions, which seem so much stronger than her convictions. Perhaps they eventually find expression in some form of institutional function. We may speculate in this manner with the knowledge that many of those who were forced to confront the Horror of ’68 (in its various national iterations), found solace in their long march through the institutions, which they eventually captured without much difficulty – and where their influence remains to this day. We are compelled to speculate like this, because all that really remains are images of their youthful ‘revolution’, which they have been able to curate without interference.  

In 2010, the newly elected UK Conservative Government raised tuition fees by 300%. Like everyone else I knew, I protested. Soon the recently closed postgraduate club at Glasgow University was ‘occupied.’ Interested to experience first-hand the revolutionary politics I had putatively committed myself to intellectually, I went along to a few of the meetings. Since the occupation comprised almost entirely of bourgeois students (future lackeys and bureaucrats) – not much was discussed aside from the various protocols for hand signals at meetings, and the rules for washing glasses and dishes. The experience was eye-opening. It was the first time I encountered the actual use of ‘consensus hands’ in place of applause, and the discussion of topics such as ‘revolutionary clowning’, on which one participant was helpfully offering to give a workshop. At a later date, I returned with some mates on our way home from the pub – one of them wanted to go and meet a girl he was seeing at the time. We assumed that the occupation would be some sort of happening party spot, but when we turned up, most were in their pajamas and promptly got mad at us for making noise and keeping them up. We were politely ejected from their non-hierarchical occupation, after another friend got a little bit too rowdy and boisterous. 

It’s curious to recall now what I was somewhat ashamed to admit at the time; that the most palpable disenchantment from that experience was not so much tied to the surprising dearth of tangible political content or my indifference to those people’s expansive (yet incoherent) identitarian preoccupations. It was more the fact they seemed so far removed from my view of what was cool. They weren’t ordinarily people I associated with; they could hardly be described as stylish or memorable, as far as I could tell (from the records lying around and the inevitable acoustic guitar renditions) their taste in music was awful, and their hobbies and cultural interests seemed infantile and moronic – many of them were unbearably annoying. 

Most were completely forgettable; fawning sycophants and student politician types who had taken a ‘radical’ turn but hadn’t yet managed to jettison the heady mix of resentment and bourgeois entitlement that ostensibly governed all of their impulses. Nevertheless, there was no denying it - my sense of ideological antipathy was seemingly motivated by what were essentially superficial aesthetic concerns. There was, in short, little poetry to be discerned in this scenario. If this was to be a rite of initiation, I would refuse outright. And it may have boiled down to something as stupid as this: had there been among them a few people who were only slightly insufferable, but were into, say, (it being 2010) slightly obscure post-punk bands, noise music, the films of Aleksandr Balabanov, Raster-Noton or double dunting on occasion - I may have been more favorably disposed. A few years later in New York I met a Columbia PhD student who confided in me a not dissimilar impression of his time at the Occupy movement. Though broadly supportive of all their aims, he felt that his fellow protestors were tedious and boring, ‘looked like shit’ and didn’t have the right ‘branding.’ I thought at the time that this was a rather absurd and puerile judgement – only remembering with some embarrassment afterwards that I had essentially thought along the same lines. I don’t believe this to be simply a personal failing or a flaw in character (though to some extent, I must admit that it is). Rather, it is also a symptom of something more pervasive and common among our generation than most are willing to admit – and which may have been common to other generations as well. 

The experience of that ‘occupation’ in Glasgow has stayed with me in the intervening decade, and tinges of discomfort periodically resurface whenever I’m confronted by images of similar protests and actions across the political spectrum, whether online or IRL (an increasingly irrelevant distinction). I admit to this only in the interests of self-critique, as I currently attempt to re-evaluate the complex theoretical relationship between the ideological and the aesthetic within the contemporary moment, where the former has become increasingly interchangeable with the latter. Such reflections also provide an interesting counterpoint between the world depicted in Les Amants Réguliers and the contemporary world of online political discourse, which is a continuation of the unresolved legacy of those 2010s ‘protest’ movements. The confluence of ideology and aesthetics, which Garrel also hints at it in his film, is one which I believe has become an inevitability within the technological paradigm we currently inhabit – a diabolical ‘Total State’, to extrapolate on Carl Schmitt’s theoretical and speculative designation, where vast Semio-corporations have taken the place of nation states. If an aesthetic conception of revolution was merely one factor of many in the history of past political upheavals, the present has propelled the aesthetic to center-stage. 

Perhaps the actual soixante-huitards were far less glamorous and image conscious than Garrel recalls. (On the other hand there is the possibly apocryphal anecdote regarding a visit by representatives of the Parti Communist Francais to the student occupation at the Sorbonne. The students sent them away, mistaking them for police agents since they looked so ‘bourgeois’ dressed in their bad suits). Whether the student protestors were actually ‘cool’ in reality is moot, however. All that survives is a mythos, an iconography and a highly curated archive. If something of May ’68 is replicated within the impotent convulsions of contemporary online leftism, it will not be its retrospective aesthetic allure. As a failed ‘revolution’, May ’68 fulfilled all expectations required to imbue such events with a certain mythic status. In addition, it happily coincided with the flowering of an energetic, spontaneous and highly aestheticized popular culture. Thus, its perception will remain frozen in time as a beautiful and tragic revolutionary moment propelled by the beautiful. This is what Garrel does well to capture, for better or worse. The question then is, how many of these sentiments will attach to our present events and actions or those of our very recent past?

The events of May ’68 loom large in the collective imagination, and have exerted an outsize influence on post-war continental philosophy – despite achieving little. The move away from structuralism coincided with the failure of May ’68, perhaps influenced by student’s distaste for the philosophers who were openly critical of their confused aims, objectives and motivations. “Structures don’t walk the streets!,” read a famous piece of graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne. Philosophers who embraced this rejection became ascendant, as the influence of others waned. Those who embraced an aestheticized form of political theory were lauded. The little achieved by the student protests, as Althusser correctly pointed out, was in reality due to the General Strike of nine million workers on the 13th of May 1968. The movement evaporated quickly after union leaders negotiated higher wages and concessions for workers. De Gaul dissolved parliament, and in the subsequent general election – Gaullist parties were returned with an even greater majority. Blissfully unaware of the internal contradictions of their movement – the student revolutionaries naively believed in the self-important power of their youth, in their idealism (in both senses), and the possibility that their brand of stubborn bourgeois individualism had the ability to act as a vanguard for an actual revolution of the proletariat. Jacques Lacan’s famously cryptic dismissal of the student movement, remains the best summation of the confused logic that underpinned their purported aims:

“As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get one.”

As Slavoj Zizek maintained, this ‘new master’ was a move away from the top-down authoritarianism of the post-war to more neutral forms of knowledge and putatively consensual forms of control – a master, in short, that does not admit he is one. This is perhaps the most persistent legacy of that era of youthful disillusion. But the reason why this brief insurrection (along with others that occurred concomitantly in other countries) inspired so many and has had since such a profound influence on cultural life was because it was conceived and received primarily in aesthetic terms. 

However, it appears that the Horror of ’68 is a lesson fated to be unlearned by every subsequent generation and rarely, if ever, re-acquired. It is a lesson that is emphatically ignored by the hysterical pseudo-revolutionaries of the present social media era, who are suspicious of radical politics as an aesthetic enterprise, because they are largely contemptuous of artistic expression that does not conform to a certain determinism and predictability. They ignore entirely the possibility that the aesthetic sphere may be the only ground available on which to conduct battle. They prefer instead to be led by a mixture of disingenuous careerist politicians, scions of millionaire fortunes, Ivy league educated utopians, aspirational property owning ‘activists’ and petit-bourgeois strivers in a slow march towards an agonizingly meek objective: establishing moderate socialist policies tinged with identitarianism in the face of an untethered, utterly rapacious, borderless technological capitalism. They don’t merely demand new masters - they appear to have already succumbed to them. 

There are many parallels between May ’68 and the present, and not only in the proliferation of outré political objectives with little prospect of success, and which seemingly exist for the sole purpose of peer-group validation. One in particular is the tendency to elide the need for concerted and organized political violence against the state and its representatives (the central element of all successful revolutionary movements across the political spectrum, and presaged by Georges Sorel in his work of 1908). The preference is rather for spectacular violence which manifests in an entirely performative and impotent rage expressed through acts of vandalism and looting. But the principle discontinuity far outweighs any similarities.

In contradistinction to the aestheticized beautiful tragedy of May ‘68, we have the farce of the present – where ‘revolution’ as ideological aesthetic, deprived of its fundamental allure, is impotently disseminated through platforms designed to neuter its efficacy by imposing onto it a self-perpetuating circular logic. It is a form of revolution which will leave a far from selective and curated aesthetic legacy. This, un-ironically, is perhaps the most important outcome of the low stakes parlor games conducted by the terminally online – and one which I hope drives home the urgency of confronting the technological mechanisms of the ideological aesthetic as a pre-requisite to any form of future action. An artistic and spiritual revolution must necessarily precede its actual form – or else, confront the pitiful alternative. As it stands the legacy of the present will be one of profusion, over-saturation and over-sharing; of selfies, takes, ill-formed analysis, sanctimonious hectoring, knee-jerk snitching, try-hardism, incoherent gestures, infantile emotional outbursts, and delusional forms of self-abjection in the pursuit of meagre approbation: cringe. All of this will be recorded and shelved to someday re-surface, either directly or indirectly. And when it does, the excruciatingly painful realization may not be that this hobbled ‘revolution’ failed, as all youthful revolutions perhaps inevitably must - but that its participants looked so fucking lame while failing. 

Udith Dematagoda is a Scottish writer and academic based in Japan. His debut novel Horizontal Rain, was published in 2020. He is the editor and publisher of Hyperidean Press