His characters are would-be revolutionaries, doomed youths, and indecisive figures paralyzed in the face of new political futures. Grappling with his cinema requires context of his birth-year. Despite a long revolutionary lineage, large-scale protest movements lay mostly dormant in post-war France. Generations of post-war babies came-of-age into a hierarchical, patriarchal society under authoritarian President Charles de Gaulle.
Yet across the s, France was aflame with youth culture. Vibrant counter-cultural art e. May of was a sudden rupture. Voices of an enraged proletariat and student body amplified from passive somniloquies into full revolt almost overnight. Revolts began with students university-age and highschooler alike.
Student protests consolidated Maoist, Trotskyists, and anarchists, rejecting the PCF and embracing contemporary international revolutionary struggles e. It was a movement built on the spontaneity of the masses, without unified ideology. By June, the uprising lost momentum. Counterrevolutionary demonstrations accumulated massive turnouts and De Gaulle called an immediate election, the outcome of which tightened right-wing legislative control. The underpinnings of French capitalismโ assailed from all fronts in an overnight shift of public consciousnessโrestabilized, unperturbed.
Naturally, revolution is not isolated; it is a buildup, amalgamating political clashes. Rosa Luxemburg theorises the mass strike writing in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution as a spontaneous surge essential for mobilising the proletariat towards full revolution.
Undeniably though, even fifty-five years later, a new French revolution never coagulated. Backdropped by a thunderstorm of violence and revolutionary reverie, Bertrand Bonello was born in Nice six months after May of Set during transitional historical moments, his films wrestle with the constitution of history.
