La Commune

In March 1871, the Parisian National Guard led an armed insurrection against France’s provisional government, sent the nation’s officials fleeing to Versailles, and transformed the capital city for two months into a socially progressive utopia. Watkin’s study of the Commune’s rise and bloody fall is equal parts meticulous historical evocation, willful anachronism and self-conscious artifice. The film takes the form of a nineteenth-century news broadcast: as an alternative to the steady stream of official propaganda emanating from “Versailles TV,” a handful of journalists enter the Commune, cameras in hand. The result, J. Hoberman wrote in The Village Voice, evokes “the unfamiliar sensation of revolutionary euphoria, or living (and dying) in a sacred time.”