In the Intense Now

It's so clear from the radiant faces of the French students on the streets of Paris in May 1968 that they are living in a magical moment, the "intense now" of an imminent revolution. Moreira Salles recognized this elated expression from the film that his mother had shot two years earlier, while traveling in Mao’s China. In this film essay, Salles intercuts the famous May 1968 archive footage with other faces full of wonder from his mother’s film. In a melancholy tone he concludes, "They may never be this happy again." But those times were themselves far from idyllic, of course. The May 1968 movement was masculine in character, reflecting the era’s balance of power—we see men speaking, and women looking silently on. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the de facto leader of this ostensibly leaderless movement, got Paris Match to finance his trip to Berlin—he and his movement evidently had market value. The uprisings in Brazil in 1964 and in Prague four years later ended in tragedy. The unique and euphoric shared experience of protest is inevitably followed by disappointment.