Searching for the Revolution in America: French Intellectuals, Black Panthers and the Spirit of May '68

摘要

Writer Jean Genet and filmmakers Agns Varda and Jean-Luc Godard chose the Black Panther Party as the subject or point of reference in their work in part because they wanted to explore late 1960s American radicalism as a positive example of a new brand of leftist revolutionary thought. While these intellectuals saw something in the Black Panthers that attracted them, it is also worth considering that for Varda, Godard, Gorin and Genet, the Black Panther Party was a tabula rasa upon which they could project their own frustrations with the failed French revolution of May 1968, allowing them to see the Panthers as a harbinger of a new form of revolution. For Genet that meant a liberationist politics of self-expression and a rejection of white privilege; for Godard and Gorin it was a break from stultifying Marxist strictures; and for Varda it represented a model that other oppressed groups, like women, could model themselves after in the pursuit of power. Black power in general and the Black Panther Party in particular appealed to these directors for many reasons, but perhaps one unifying factor was that, at its essence, black power was a vital counter-hegemonic discourse that exposed the ideal of America as incomplete and ultimately false. Another was the Black Panthers' (and other black nationalists and pan-Africanists') use of the language of anticolonialism to expose the repressive and thus disingenuous power of the state in its police force, prison system, schools and other institutions. The Panthers were exposing their nation and their government in a way that threatened to rupture it from within, just as the events of May 1968 represented a rupture, albeit a brief one, in the Gaullist ideal of the nation-state.