By Glenn Dunks
With the recent conclusion of the Cannes Film Festival, it’s perhaps easy to forget that 50 years ago the Festival de Cannes was shut down. The event, which had curiously opened with a restoration of Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind, last barely a few days with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lelouche spearheading a mission to close the festival down in solidarity with the student protests and union strikes that were sweeping across the country.
It perhaps says a lot about the scope of global upheaval in 1968 that this famous and dramatic moment in cinematic history isn’t even mentioned in João Moreira Salles’ No Intenso Agora (or, less elegantly, In the Intense Now). Despite its rich dive through film history, Salles (his brother is Walter Salles, director of The Motorcycle Diaries and On the Road) instead chooses to focus his attention on celluloid of an altogether different kind; assembling a quietly stunning collection of family home-movies, documentary, and observation archival footage into a visual collage that bounces between France, Czechoslovakia, China and Brazil to observe the wildly escalating political shifts and doing so with an unromanticized sense of anti-nostalgia.
It’s a filmmaking tact that will no doubt frustrate those who want a glossier glimpse at the events of fifty years ago. There are already films and television series that do that and do that well. In the Intense Now, instead, chooses to find its dramatic heft from the minutia. Newly discovered home videos show Salles mother in China, a nation then awash in the words and image of Mao. Salles observes that in spite of the unfamiliar and briskly changing world that she found herself in, she appears at her most happy in this footage. His own narration reflecting on the power of discovering footage such as this keying the audience into the very potent idea that for many of us we have little idea that we are filming history when we turn a camera on. This beautiful super eight footage, the only colour film featuring across its 127-minute runtime, is haunting in many ways and incredible to see, especially today, as the country has well and truly transitioned into its next phase of national identity.
This footage of China is situated next to amateur film from Czechoslovakia during the Soviet invasion following the Prague Spring and, most significantly, footage of France’s historic May of 1968, with a small amount of Brazil, where Salles' expatriate family vacationed and which was experiencing its own class shifts. The passion that we see in these videos of students and workers striking is palpable, but there is something very intentional in the coolness that Salles portrays it. He notes that in spite of the violence and anger around them, many of these young French people were never and would never be happier than they were at that moment. The ultimate rejection of the movement – or, less fantastically, the mere ‘moving on’ of the people – is a frightening sting in the tail to recognise in this 50-years-later moment of societal unrest.
Throughout the film, Salles lingers on freeze frames longer than is to be expected, often allowing his hushed, leisurely paced narration to soothe over an image and let the audience take in what he is saying about a particular face, action or moment in time. For a film that strikingly links cinema with that of the working class, so often the ones hit hardest by revolutions (whether they be failed or successful), it’s curious and also quite appropriate that Salles should choose to end the picture on the 46-second reel of Louis Lumiere’s Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory from 1895. In some ways, this sly trick of editing helps illuminate all that has come before. Whether it be 50 or 120 years ago, it’s important to observe the past with clear eyes in order to better learn for the future. We have no idea who any of the people in Lumiere Factory are, and many of the faces we see on screen in In the Intense Now are nameless, too, but their impact and their efforts cannot be forgotten.
This is a passionate documentary that builds intensity from the way it eschews typical theatrics of films about uprisings and revolutions and instead focuses on the real people on the ground who observed history and can allow us to see that moment in time and realize how no matter how much things change so much remains the same. This may be a film about 50 years ago, but as the title suggests, it could very well be about 'now', as well.