No Intenso Agora

Brazilian director Joao Moreira Salles wrote and directed this documentary (English Title: In the Intense Now) wrapped around the years 1966-1968 and the intense revolutionary spirit that engulfed certain parts of the world: France, foremost, but also Czechoslovakia, China and Brazil. Although the movie is inherently political, it rises above politics to express the fleetingness of self-actualization, the kind moments of such a spiritual coming together catalyzes. Although a tad long and sometimes too explicitly ponderous, Salles's work provides a unique frame to a very particular moment in time which is exceptionally relevant in the present day climate, all around the world.

The starting point for this project, composed predominantly of amateur archival footage, was Salles stumbling across film recordings his mother had shot during her visit to China in 1966. It was the first year of the Cultural Revolution, but what's really striking is the almost transformative effect the experience had on his mother. Providing a somewhat pedantic observational narrative, brimming with suppositions about what certain scenes mean, or what protagonists recorded on video might be thinking and feeling, the director spends most of the movie in Paris, where he lived for a while around the same period. Then, in May 1968, protests broke out among students in France, against the class- driven hierarchization of society and sexual conservatism. The dispute between students, on the one side, and university administration and the government on the other, escalated quickly, as worker unions joined the protests. All of a sudden, France was paralyzed. And liberated, at the same time, as Salles observes.

The events of those months are about more than social discord though. Salles nuances the idealism which spread like brushfire, manifesting itself in certain leading characters of the otherwise leaderless 'revolution', like Daniel Cohn-Bendit – a student at the University of Nanterre, where the protests were ignited before reaching the Sorbonne and Paris. The shift in communication dynamics, from a stifling top-down approach rooted in centuries of class division, stood out in interviews of the time. Yet, more than anything else, the protests also developed a renewed sense of belonging and generated an artistic flurry of dissent, Banksy-esque almost, including:

Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible (Be realistic, ask the impossible)

Sous les paves, la plage (Under the paving stones, the beach)

It's hard not to feel something. And then, the movement slowly withered – in the approximate words of Jean-Paul Sartre, who personally interviewed Cohn-Bendit: Spring belongs to the students, but Summer belongs to the holidays. Moreso, the commercial potential became obvious and even Cohn-Bendit, exiled for a short while in Germany, ended up writing a memoir of the events for a quick buck and a publishing deal. The Revolution that never was, lead with spontaneity and not with political manifestos and lists of demands, then faded, resulting in minimal, percentage-sized improvements to worker wages. The divide persisted as well, even between the protesters, as the worker class and the student class never found the equal footing. In the wake of it, desolation set in for the idealists, even though the landscape for social and political movements had changed forever. Salles contrasts martyrdom across Paris, Prague (the Soviet occupation, after the Spring protests) and Rio (march against the military dictatorship), focusing on the familial textures as well as the wider social impact of these deaths, questioning whether they represent persistent hope or the effigy thereof.

What really hits hard is the sense that for many involved, especially among the students, those days of 1968 were the highlights of their lives, the purest form of ébouillant existence, living 'in the intense now'. There's a joy of camaraderie, of a mutual and subliminal understanding which stem from the joint struggle. One wonders whether the depth of those weeks of protests, of standstill, is something that can still be today, with the rhythm of life and the exhibitionist nature of social media. Although subverting the status quo should be easier, just by looking at the recent (and ongoing) protests in my home country, Romania, I'm left more with vague hope, than conviction. I don't dare draw further parallels, because these are not trifles; they are intricate manifestations of a shared design of what life should be, in spite of apparent similarities.

Salles stumbled across the perfect time frame per chance. His work on No Intenso Agora started in 2012, before the world went aflame – in his native Brazil, in Europe, in the United States. The choice of spanning over four different manifestations of revolt is overbearing and tentative at times, but one can sense an inner core holding them together. Perhaps what bothered me, if anything in particular, was some of the narration, coming across as professorial. Once purpose was established, more natural expression and feeling coming directly from the images could have enhanced their impact and their significance, not unlike something as eccentric as The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010).

Other than that though, this was the best movie I had the chance of watching at the Berlinale. It's a strange mix of analytical-poetic- social justice, that ultimately leaves a lingering sense of how fleeting and unique some of the most important moments of our lives can be. There is no recipe to it, but Salles clearly indicates that a tempestuously exhibited shared belief, with the deep tributaries of 1968, can change our perception of purpose and existence. I'm not sure I completely agree, but the thesis is compelling and No Intenso Agora is good at expressing it.

This documentary pieces together (via found footage) amateur filmmaking from Brazil, China, Czechoslovakia and France to bracket the years of 1966 to 1968. It documents the protests in these countries looking at the working conditions, class divisions and civil disobedience amongst a young generation that ignited a late 60's social consciousness.

It results in a visual melancholy of nostalgic imagery from hand held 16mm and Super 8 cameras, sometimes with no sound ranging from tender moments of family life to moments after major street violence erupted, people trying to gather themselves.

Salles gives the viewer a historic timeline by splicing amateurish shot footage in between actual snippets of news reel interviews, radio spots with presidents and critical thinkers of the time like Jean-Paul Sartre.

This documentary reminds us of a time before the usage of social media activism and iPhone apps to document life around us.

An interesting documentary but too long. Typical interpretations of images from an outdated vision. Commendable are the amateur film scenes that greatly enrich the content. A realistic vision of the failure of the Prague Spring, of the Parisian student movement of 1968, not to mention the footage of the funeral of a student killed by the Rio de Janeiro police also in 1968. What ruins the documentary is the Freudian presence of the director's mother through foolish footage taken in China. Like, "thanks mom." Apart from this foolish exhibitionism of the family itself, the Paris, Prague and Rio de Janeiro 1968 problem is very interesting.

Monotonous, repetitive, too long. The narrator (director) voice is boring, I almost snooze. Hélas!

At times interesting, No Intenso Agora struggles to reach a point, hence its length. It is ultimately a film about the loss of something unexperienced. The director narrates mostly amateur footage from '68 in order to understand the "intense now" that supposedly existed then, and only then.

Again, we're back to Paris '68 in all its monotony. The director explores the commodification of the movement without going far enough to question whether the focus or "magic" we attach to that time is itself a product of this commodification. Or differently, without this stock interpretation of history, whether the arrogance of France to consider its own politics as particularly special is justified, and whether our accepting this moves us further from the truth, which is that an "intense now" is still available, lived or visible without masturbating over the same old images of France in the '60s.

The film also includes his mother, making this a more Freudian project, and her images of China, which the director describes as badly shot despite being the most visually interesting the film has to offer. I wonder how he would describe his own narration here? As it drones and meanders like its hastily recorded to get the timing of a rouch cut down before doing it again properly later.

The film and its narration take a turn for the better about halfway through, with welcome respite from May '68 in the form of Prague, its (re)invasion by the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, and the aftermath. The amateur films are better, they are given much more space, and the director's analysis of them is sharper. The events, too, seem far more significant. When returning to France, the contrast adds a certain hilarity to all the performative posturing which all too quickly gives way to loud, complaint-filled passivisity and obedient labour.

The comparison is drawn, the point is almost reached. Why join in with the previous generation's nostalgia for its selectively remembered youth? Was there ever really an intense now for more than a select few? Is it telling that, as soon as we look elsewhere, a greater honesty and depth of feeling is found almost immediately? Is there an honest attempt here to reach an "intense now" or is this an action designed to further distance us from it, and, if so, why?