Search Results

Nine screenshots from the film The Diary of an Unknown Soldier by P. Watkins The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961) are the two first films of Peter Watkins. These two short films might appear as less ambitious as The War Game (1965), Punishment Park (1970) and La Commune (1999);...

La Commune (de Paris, 1871) by Peter Watkins (see also an old article about Punishment Park) filmed in 1999 is the absolute reference for the NY Commune project as it addresses the question of the Paris Commune through a cinematographic work being itself a democratic construction. This film is basing its plot on a historical...

Welcome to the 34th issue of The Funambulist. For it, we have decided to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune. If you live in France, you will know that we’re far from being the only ones to have this idea: many new books are being published and events being organized. What might make...

The eleventh volume of The Funambulist Pamphlets that gathers and edits past articles of the blog about cinema is now officially published by Punctum Books in collaboration with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School. You can either download the book as a PDF for free or order it online for the price of $7.00 or €6.00. Next...

Stills from the film Diary of an Unknown Soldier by Peter Watkins (1959) / See past article The second series of The Funambulist Papers, dedicated to the bodies is almost over (four more texts soon forthcoming), and the book that collects its essays is currently being edited. Today, we have the chance to read a text...

Excerpt from Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2012) I am currently reading To Our Friends (La Fabrique, Semiotext(e), 2014) (by that I mean that I started it yesterday evening and will finish it today!), the ‘sequel’ of The Coming Insurrection (see 2009 article). Even though I was expecting no less from the...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs] In 1956, Alain Resnais created a 20-minute long film entitled Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World’s Memory) that beautifully mixes documentary information with a fictitious style of filming and editing. What I just wrote is however symptomatic of a prejudice according to which documentary should tend towards objectivity in an attempt...

Aarhus-based architect James Martin was kind enough to share with me the small book he created (with the help of my friends Ben Clement and Sebastian de la Cour) around, what I would call, an archaeology of truth in Northern Ireland. He named the book Revising Histories [building truth] to reflect the collection of narratives...

Barricade during the Paris Commune in 1871 I am currently writing an essay about “landscapes of insurgencies” across which the architectural typology of the barricade is, of course, predominant. This post will not be elaborating about this topic, since I am doing it in this essay, but rather gives a set of references specifically for...