Utopian Cinema

Unfortunately, the Utopian Cinema screening initially planned for tonight has to be rescheduled. We will be showing Mdree-Bahree Land of the Sea & The Last Angel of History and doing our Q&A with Miriam Haile **next Wednesday**, August 17th at 9pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/1775817666041342/

Utopian Cinema comes to Copenhagen!

Hi all - sorry about the change of plans regarding the screening last night.

I hope everyone gets a chance to watch La Cecilia on YouTube in advance of next week's meeting so that we can all discuss it then.

Just wanted to give a quick self-plug: if you're interested in the topic of 19th century utopian communities such as La Colonia Cecilia, you should come to my lecture on the topic this Wednesday night at Flux Factory.

Cecilia may get a brief mention, but the bulk of the talk will be on the extravagant and hugely popular French utopian Charles Fourier. In one interview, Comolli mentioned reading Fourier's writing as an influence on his decision to make La Cecilia:

In my case, the reference to anarchism mainly came from books. I had read Fourier before La Cecilia, and, like everyone who reads Fourier, I was absolutely dumbfounded, both by his formidable system, and, at the same, by his excess of freedom, his sheer weirdness.

Jean-Louis Comolli gives his thoughts on the final scene of La Cecilia...

Hey everyone,

I'm sorry to announce that the screening of La Cecilia at Flux Factory tonight has been cancelled, due to an emergency meeting being called at Utopia School.

I hope that you'll all get a chance to watch the film on YouTube in advance of next week's screening (Mister Lonely), so that we can spend some time discussing it as a group at the start of class.

“La colonia della Cecilia” (2 versions) - the song which inspired Jean-Louis Comolli to write the script for La Cecilia.

One of the positive aspects about the film is that it awoke a subject that was at the beginning of its end, and that is for me one of the historic roles of cinema. Cinema arrives at the end. In order to avoid things disappearing, the cinema perpetuates them. Giorgio Agamben talks about that in ‘Notes on Gesture’ (1992). At the end of the nineteenth century, one’s gestures related to their class, such as their manners and specific fashion choices, but this association was starting to disappear. Cinema comes to film the last glimpses of these class gestures in a parallel world of images. It is also interesting how the militant cinema films the workers’ movement, just when the workers’ fight is finishing. It inherits the ruins and recuperates a world that is disappearing.  C.E. Ruthenberg (1882—1927), founder of the American Communist Party said, ‘our responsibility as revolutionaries is that of saving which is still in time to be saved; we are the real “conservatives”’. Capitalism destroys and erases very fast, and the duty of cinema is to bring the interesting bits to light.

Here are some photos from the real life La Colônia Cecília - an Italian-originated "experiment in anarchist communism and free love [that] lasted for about five years" in rural Brazil in the 1890s. Starting with only 5 people, it grew to have about 250 members at its peak. On the bottom right is community founder Giovanni Rosi.

Richard Porton, in his book Film and the Anarchist Imagination, discusses the reception of Jean-Louis Comolli's La Cecilia by his former peers at Cahiers.