American Cinematheque

Sunday, May 14 – 6:30 PM

REPRISE
1997
195 min.
Dir. HervÈ Le Roux.

One of the monuments of contemporary documentary cinema ó and not only in France, REPRISE offers a provocative re-evaluation of the tumultuous and by now mythical events in May of 1968 and their aftermath. On June 10, 1968, students from the Parisian film school, IDHEC recorded the end of the strike at the Wonder Factory in Saint-Ouen. A young woman worker refused to go back to work. After director HervÈ le Roux saw a photograph of her in Cahiers du CinÈma he began a long search for this “heroine,” a search that charts the changes in French radical politics over the past 30 years.

“When we set up contacts with everyone in summer 1995, explaining our intentions, most people including the unionists asked, ëWe would like to contribute but who would ever be interested in these old stories?í I didnít want to make an antiquated or a nostalgic film. 20-year-olds consider it a historical film. It describes a vanished world: large industrial companies in left-wing suburbs, a kind of company culture, a sense of belonging which has disappeared and been replaced with insecurity, the fear of the loss of jobs. And yet, despite predictions by officials about the workersí situation, it remains basically unchanged, the way others predict the death of cinema.” ñ HervÈ Le Roux