La Commune (Paris, 1871) · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A reporter holds a modern microphone up to a washerwoman in the Popincourt quarter and asks what she makes of the Commune's decrees. She answers at length, in 1871 dress, in a disused factory in Montreuil in the summer of 1999. Behind her the darkness is not night. It is the black of a shed wall nobody has bothered to hide.

Almost the whole film is in that shot. A truth-telling instrument is aimed at an event it could not have covered, inside a space that admits to being a space, and the woman speaking is not acting so much as arguing.

The easy reaction is to call this a stunt: television in 1871, a joke you get in ten seconds and then sit with for five and three quarter hours. Worth resisting, because the anachronism does something a faithful reconstruction cannot. Deleuze has a name for it. He called it the powers of the false: what happens when a film stops trying to be an accurate record and starts using its own untruth as an instrument. Not lying. Making truth something manufactured in front of you rather than recovered from behind you. Watkins takes the grammar we trust most, handheld camera, live sound, a reporter arriving late to an argument already underway, and hangs it on an event no camera saw. That grammar is a promise: this happened, we merely caught it. He keeps the promise visible and breaks it in the same breath. The operator strays into frame. The mic enters the shot. What you notice is not that 1871 has been faked, but that this is how you receive every event now.

Then the falsification turns structural. There are two channels. Télévision Nationale Versailles reads composed bulletins from an anchor desk; Télévision Communale runs into the street and hands the microphone to shoemakers and schoolteachers. Watkins cuts between them so the same events acquire two incompatible descriptions in adjacent shots, with no third voice arriving to settle it. Deleuze's term is falsifying narration: accounts that cannot both be right, offered as equally real, the adjudication left where it actually belongs. Documentary's old contract says the camera does not lie. Watkins agrees. The lie was never in the camera; it was in the desk, the bulletin, the choice of who gets the mic.

The deeper move is on the other side of that mic. More than two hundred largely non-professional participants were recruited across the Paris region and spent months researching the figures and social types they would play, assembling their own arguments and much of their own dialogue. In character they do not deliver lines. They restate positions they have come to hold, and you can hear the difference. Deleuze, thinking about documentaries where real people invent themselves in front of a camera, called this fabulation: story-telling as an act, people caught in the middle of legending themselves into existence. What fills the soundtrack is not dialogue in the dramatic sense but speech acts, testimony and argument and someone taking the floor, overlapping and often indistinct in a reverberant shed. There is no score. The only music is what a crowd makes when it finds a tune, which strips out the main instrument historical films use to tell you what to feel. What is left sounds like a meeting, and asks what a meeting asks.

Then a participant steps out of 1871 and speaks as a resident of 1999 France, about immigration, insecure work, the Front National, who owns the media. At that moment the costume stops being a period and becomes cloth on a person you can see. Deleuze borrowed a word from Brecht for this: the gest, a posture that exposes the social relation it belongs to. Watkins is not asking you to stop believing. He is asking you to see the believing and the arrangement at once.

Why build five and three quarter hours out of that? Because of the idea Deleuze thought modern political cinema has to start from: the people are missing. Older political film assumed a people already there, waiting to be addressed. After the defeats, the filmmaker inherits an absence instead, and the job changes from representing a people to helping invent one. La Commune carries that absence twice. Its subject is a people annihilated inside a week during the Semaine Sanglante. Its cast comes from present-day communities that do not experience themselves as one, including French citizens and residents of North African descent, playing Communards. Fabulation is what fills the gap, and it is not nostalgia. The reconstruction is a rehearsal.

Every so often the film simply stops. A panel of white text fills the screen and holds long enough to read: dates, casualty figures, historiographical context, and Watkins addressing you directly about the standardised grammar of broadcast media, what he calls the Monoform. Deleuze called an image that has to be read rather than immediately seen a lectosign, an image that has lost its self-evidence and asks to be deciphered. Street, meeting hall, church, barricade and both television studios were built inside the one hangar, so the machinery of representation stands a few metres from what it represents. Deleuze described that arrangement in Syberberg: the world put into a studio until the image becomes a surface where information is laid out to be read. The other argument is duration. Shots run a minute and far longer where broadcast television ran a few seconds, and 345 minutes refuse the hour blocks a schedule is built from. ARTE, which commissioned that length, delayed the film, prepared a shortened version, and transmitted it outside peak hours.

None of this arrived from nowhere. Culloden (1964) is the direct template: a handheld crew covering an eighteenth-century battle with to-camera interviews, whispered field commentary, captions counting the dead. The War Game (1966) supplies the interruption grammar whole, printed statistical panels cutting across staged action so you weigh document against dramatisation instead of being carried by either. Punishment Park (1971) contributes the crew embedded inside the fiction and improvised political argument as the film's language; Edvard Munch (1974) perfected the anachronistic interview and the overlapping whisper bed. Renoir's La Marseillaise (1938), financed by subscription, dissolved a revolution into ensemble talk with no hero. Watkins pushes that dispersal past the point where a protagonist could form, into what Deleuze called a dispersive situation: many weakly linked people, nobody whose choices carry the plot. And there is the ancestor he works against. The New Babylon (1929), the prior great Commune film, compresses the event into accelerating rhythm with FEKS montage and a Shostakovich score. Watkins removes exactly what that film supplied.

Naming descendants is harder, and the difficulty belongs to the story. A 345-minute black-and-white film in French had no conventional distribution path; it lives through festivals, museums, universities and home video. What it passes on is a method rather than a filmography: recruit the people with a stake in the question, let them research and write their own positions, leave the machinery in shot. Geoff Bowie's The Universal Clock (2001), shot around the Montreuil set, records how it was done.

Watch it once for the history and it will feel repetitive. Watch the faces at the moment they stop being 1871, and the real subject arrives: what it costs, and what it takes, to speak in public about your own conditions. Whether the invention worked is the question the film leaves open. The Commune lasted seventy-two days and its people were shot; the participants went home in 1999 to the country they had just been describing. A film cannot manufacture a people. It can rehearse one on camera and let you watch it happen. Whether that counts as politics or only as evidence is the argument Watkins hands you, and the reason he made it long enough for you to have it.