One+One: and The London Underground Film Festival Present "Revolutions in Progress" Screening and Discussion

One+One and The London Underground Film Festival present Revolutions in
Progress screening and discussion.

One+One: Filmmakers Journal have teamed up with the LUFF to present a round table
discussion on the topic of revolution, with filmmakers, cultural theorists and activists. We will
be screening a selection of films submitted to our film challenge, Revolutions in Progress to
aid the discussion (details below). Along with this we will also launch and distribute free
copies of our December issue.

It takes place on Saturday, 3rd of December between 2-3.30pm at the Horse Hospital in
London. Discounted advance tickets are available for 3.50GBP here or 5GBP at the door.
Please join us for what promises to be an insightful and timely conversation about the place
of filmmaking and the screening of revolution.

Revolutions in Progress: A Film Challenge from One+One: Filmmakers J ournal

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the
one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and
seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

The term utopia was developed by Sir Thomas More, a play on words between no-place
and good-place. It captures the eternal nature of ideas that can emerge again and again
throughout history and which are never reducible to human particularities, nor to reality as it
is. Dreams of the good always exceed their historical placing. Thus they demand critical and
dynamic thought, never a simple acceptance of the status quo or any idea of an end of
history. Utopia may never be reached, but this is what gives it its revolutionary potential. It is
always a critical impulse. The utopian idea appears as an imperative whose demands again
and again call us to action. Since the dawn of man utopian ideas and revolutionary action
has punctured human existence, albeit intermitted with reactionary and conservative breaks
where utopian dreams would appear to fade for all eternity. Yet these intermissions have
almost always been short lived. Badiou, for example, describes how the revolutionary period
from the French Revolution and the Paris Commune [1792 to 1871] and the period between
the Bolshevik revolution and the radical politics of the 60s and 70s [1917 to 1976] was
intermitted with a 40 year period of reappraisal where revolutionary politics appeared to
come to an end
i
. In this period, a vanguard group of artists and intellectuals had to
experiment, address issues brought up by the failings of the previous revolutionary period
and prepare for the next one. Within the intermissions between revolutionary periods we find
not only the reactionary backlash, but also intellectuals, artists and activists rethinking ideas,
reformulating and preparing the way for the next period. History is never-ending.

Today we find ourselves in another such intermission, Capitalism, with all its gross
inequalities, is here to stay, or so we are told by figures of nearly every political camp. Even
a huge financial crisis cant stop the forward march of the neo-liberal agenda. Yet something
else hangs in the air. A revolutionary fire is beginning to burn in the peoples hearts. In North
America and Europe drastic austerity measures are introducing a new generation to
revolution, the Arab world, likewise, is witnessing incredible revolutionary upheaval aimed at
ending tyranny and South America has been experimenting with populist socialist
movements driving towards a different economic model. Meanwhile, intellectuals and writers
as diverse as Badiou, iek, Negri, the invisible committee and Harvey have been inventing
innovative paths beyond meagre reformism, while inspiring a whole new generation.
Technology is equally causing the word revolution to resurface. Just as the radical spirit of
the 60s was occasioned by the birth of the TV and Popular media, so, the world asks, what
will be the effect of the internet, social media and the digital camcorder? Yet for many of us
what remains lacking is not the revolutionary vigour, but an idea. We know there is a need
for change, we just dont know how to think about it. Without an idea, each revolutionary cry
is easily subsumed into the neo-conservative demand for (capitalist) freedom and
(parliamentary) democracy, and the cries for genuine emancipatory justice go unheard. It is
hard not to miss the chasm that opens up between mere change and a genuine revolution.
One changes the world, but leaves the core problematic the same, the other addresses the
problematic at its core and pushes it towards a genuine resolution. Or as iek wrote on the
recent events in Egypt:

After Mubarak sent the army against the protesters, the choice became clear: either a cosmetic
change in which something changes so that everything stays the same, or a true break.
ii

If we are to succeed we must not only have a revolution, but genuine revolution grounded in
a genuine idea. A revolution without ideas is mere mindless violence, an order which
replaces itself with another order. Yet we must not simply sore off into flights of fantasy that
a genuine revolution is around the corner, or that the system as it is, is okay. We must face
the unpleasant facts, problems and dilemmas left to us by the previous epoch, without
resigning ourselves to the world as it is with all its horrific injustice and inequality. This is the
difficult task that any inventor/experimenter of culture faces today.

Only by grasping the idea and not merely the form of revolution can we hope to affect a
genuine change. When Godard made his film Sympathy For the Devil (or as he would have
preferred it called: One plus One) he was largely in the sway of such a cultural upheaval and
re-evaluation. The film was a revolution in process as much as it was in content. The film
layered imagery, music and quoted text to capture the sense of a revolution in progress: a
never ending revolution whose results will always remain undecided.

With these questions in mind, One+One set a challenge to its readers. It invited submissions
of short films which deal with the theme Revolutions in Progress. The film was to be both a
mix of drama and documentary in homage to the great revolution film Sympathy for the
Devil / One plus One, at least 50% of the film's dialogue/voice over (if any) was to be quoted
from somewhere else, copyrighted music was allowed, and the film was to be a maximum of
10 minutes.

i
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, New Left Review 2/49, January-February 2008
ii
Slavoj iek, Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit? The western liberal reaction to the uprisings in Egypt and
Tunisia frequently shows hypocrisy and cynicism, The Guardian, Tuesday 1st February 2011.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/egypt-tunisia-revolt)

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