Screening the Impossible explores how the new revolutionary ideologies that emerged in the various global articulations of the “long 1968” produced new forms of revolutionary cinematic practice - what I collectively refer to as a second wave of revolutionary filmmaking. The project focuses on films largely from the 1960s and 1970s that engage the revolutionary energies of the period to examine the relationship between emotion, aesthetics, and political theory in an international cinematic context. Drawing on the claim that the global rebellions of the 1960s mark the denunciation of early 20th century revolutionary narratives, it traces the connections between filmmakers who are similarly preoccupied with the limits, failures, and counter-revolutionary appropriations of orthodox revolutionary thought and yet remain committed to the necessity of revolutionary transformation. Through a comparative analysis of films from various national traditions, the project examines how the political cinema of this period develops a new understanding of revolutionary process and the role that cinema can play in it. At its core, the project lays out the aesthetic and affective contours of this emergent genre, arguing that second wave revolutionary cinema is characterized by its rejection of the teleological narratives and didactic political messages embedded in earlier first wave revolutionary cinematic production. In order to overcome the limits of Marxist orthodoxy where revolution is understood as an end goal, second wave films radicalize the concept. Returning to the root of the word “revolution,” they reimagine it as a non-teleological, repetitious, and “uncompletable” practice that emphasizes process, circularity, and perpetuity.Screening the Impossible begins by examining this alternate form of revolutionary process through the motifs of repetition and everydayness in Guy Debord's Critique de la séparation and In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni and in Ousmane Sembène's Borom Sarret. From here, the project takes up the impact of this alternate conception of revolution on the aesthetics of revolutionary cinema in Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va Bien and Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe, arguing that the second wave rejection of a didactic politics results in a cinema that refuses to affirm what revolution is or how it should be enacted. Rather, these films develop a cinematic form that troubles linearity and refuses clear and direct articulation, instead privileging ambiguous, connotative, polyvalent, contradictory, and open-ended forms. Furthermore, it argues that this new revolutionary ideology leads to a concomitant shift away from optimism and the Grand Passions towards negative and unpleasant feelings. Focusing on the films of Dusan Makavejev, it argues that this negative emotional register diagnoses the affective experience of a revolutionary ideology that no longer has faith in the optimism inspired by the teleological certainty of revolutionary transformation. At the same time, these negative feelings at once mark the possibilities of a revolutionary cinema and this cinema's recognition of its own political limits. The project concludes with an examination of Godard's Ici et ailleurs and John Abraham's Amma Ariyan as two films that critique the `68 moment by looking back upon its failures. These films lay out a spectral relation to the past that puts the failures of revolution to work against an ideology that would bury them, thus prompting a retheorization of revolution as a history of suffering. This alternate historical orientation expands representations of revolution to include images of violence, trauma, and loss, thus reinstating suffering and melancholia as fundamental parts of any attempt to think a revolutionary politics and cinema.
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