Desires for reality : radicalism and revolution in Western European film

Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film addresses a provocative and controversial period of European cinema: the high-tide of dissenting and militant film-making, of 1968, and its aftermath. This study offers an immersion in the revolutionary fervour that gripped the intellectual left, and the confrontational, unbound, remarkable and at times impenetrable films that resulted from a synchronisation of sexual liberation, political radicalism and social upheaval. The roster of acclaimed auteurs involved, including Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Philippe Garrel, Michelangelo Antonioni and Werner Schroeter, indicates that few post-war film-makers were unaffected. Even “low culture” cinema (horror, psychedelia, pornography and Spaghetti Westerns) was reoriented towards youth in revolt while taking advantage of the new-found liberties of the “permissive society”. Desires for Reality seeks to revisit a moment in which cinema was life, and on the front line of the barricades, rather than entertainment